What Happened
HMS Erebus and HMS Terror left Kent in May 1845 under Sir John Franklin, provisioned for three years and carrying a library of some two thousand books, a daguerreotype apparatus and a hand organ. Five men were sent home from Greenland, leaving 129. Whalers saw them in Baffin Bay in late July, moored to an iceberg, waiting for the ice to open. Nobody in Europe saw them again.
They wintered at Beechey Island, where three men died and were buried. In September 1846 the ships were beset in the ice off King William Island and never moved under their own power again. Franklin died on 11 June 1847. In April 1848, after nineteen months trapped, the 105 survivors abandoned the ships and started south on foot for a river a thousand kilometres from any help, hauling ships' boats on sledges. They died strung out along the coast. The furthest anyone got was Starvation Cove, still about sixty-four kilometres short of the river mouth.
One Sheet of Paper
Everything written by the expedition that has ever been recovered fits on a single page, found in a cairn at Victory Point in 1859. It is a pre-printed Admiralty form, the kind supplied to be sealed in bottles and thrown overboard to chart ocean currents, with the request to forward it printed in six languages. The last testament of 129 men is written on drift-bottle stationery.
The first message, dated 28 May 1847, is calm and administrative. It gives the ships' position, records the Beechey Island winter, notes that a party of eight had left to explore, and ends: Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well.
The second is scrawled around the margins eleven months later, in a different hand. The ships were deserted on 22 April 1848, having been beset since September 1846. One hundred and five souls landed. Sir John Franklin died on 11 June 1847. The total loss by deaths in the expedition to this date has been nine officers and fifteen men. And then, in the hand of Crozier, the senior surviving officer, the last line anyone from the expedition ever wrote: and start tomorrow, 26th, for Back's Fish River.
Fourteen days separate All well from Franklin's death. Twenty-four of 129 men, nearly one in five, died between the two messages, a rate wildly out of line with other Royal Navy Arctic voyages. And there is a third, quieter thing on the page. A marginal line notes the document had been moved from where it was deposited by the late Commander Gore, the officer who wrote All well. He was dead too, and had been promoted posthumously by an Admiralty that knew none of it.
What John Rae Was Told
In April 1854, at Pelly Bay, an Orkney-born Hudson's Bay Company surveyor named John Rae met Inuit who told him what had happened. He was not searching for Franklin; he was surveying. Over roughly two months he interviewed more than a dozen people. They described a ship lost off King William Island, and between thirty-five and forty starving white men dragging a boat south over the ice, and the last of them dying near a large river. Rae bought relics from them: silver cutlery with Franklin officers' crests, and a decoration belonging to Franklin himself.
He reported it honestly, including the part that ended his career: that from the state of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, the men had clearly been driven to cannibalism to prolong their lives.
He also defended his sources carefully. That twenty or twenty-five Inuit could for two months repeat the same account without varying on any material point was, he wrote, the clearest proof the information was founded on fact. And he stated plainly that the men had not been murdered by Inuit but had starved.
What Britain Did About It
Lady Jane Franklin, who had made her husband's disappearance a national cause and largely built his posthumous reputation, recruited Charles Dickens, then the most influential writer in the English-speaking world. In December 1854 he published a two-part response in his own journal.
His argument had two parts. The first was an assertion about English character: that it was in the highest degree improbable that such men as the officers and crews of those ships would, in any extremity of hunger, do such a thing. The second was the part that actually did the work, and it is worth quoting exactly, because it is the whole of the counter-evidence: we believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel.
He dismissed the testimony as second-hand through an interpreter and went further, floating the suggestion that the Inuit had murdered Franklin's men themselves. He was careful to acquit Rae personally of blame. The effect was unchanged: the evidence was rejected because of who had provided it.
Rae replied in the same journal, pointing out that the Inuit knew too well what starvation was to be mistaken about it, and that they would starve for days before sacrificing even their dogs. It made no difference. He received the government reward eventually and shared it with his men, and he retired from exploration. Every other major figure in the Franklin search was knighted. Rae never was.
The Slow Vindication
Nobody ever produced evidence against Rae. What arrived instead, over a century and a half, was confirmation.
- 1981. The first physical evidence: cut marks on a femur from a King William Island site, and a skull broken deliberately.
- 1997. A study of a site at Erebus Bay containing nearly four hundred bones from at least eleven individuals found cut marks on ninety-two of them, about a quarter of the assemblage. Electron microscopy showed the cuts were made by metal blades, not animal teeth or stone tools, and the pattern matched deliberate disarticulation at the joints and defleshing along muscle attachments. Three long bones had been broken to open the marrow cavity.
- 2015. A re-examination of bones from two sites found pot polish, the abrasion left when bone ends rub the walls of a cooking vessel during boiling. That is the signature of end-stage cannibalism: breaking and boiling bones for marrow fat after the flesh is gone. The authors wrote that the evidence supports the testimony of the nineteenth-century Inuit informants.
- 2024. DNA matched a jawbone to a living descendant and identified it as Captain James Fitzjames, commander of Erebus and the man who wrote the 1848 message. It bears cut marks. The highest-ranking member of the expedition ever identified is also direct physical evidence that the officers were not exempt.
Inuit said it in 1854. A femur said it in 1981, ninety-two bones in 1997, the cooking pots in 2015, and a named Royal Navy captain in 2024. Every stage of the forensic record has moved toward the Inuit account. Nothing has ever moved the other way.
Finding the Ships by Listening
Three separate nineteenth-century expeditions independently recorded Inuit accounts of a ship near an area they called Utjulik, more than a hundred miles south of where the vessels had been abandoned. One witness described boarding a ship frozen in the ice and finding the body of a dead man in a bunk. Another drew a map. All of it was largely disregarded, and all of it was correct.
Louie Kamookak, a teacher from Gjoa Haven, spent more than thirty years interviewing Inuit elders and cross-referencing what they said against Royal Navy records and the nineteenth-century search narratives. In 2008, before the modern search began, he sat down with Parks Canada and told them where to look. The search area moved south.
HMS Erebus was found on 2 September 2014 in about eleven metres of water, roughly a hundred kilometres south of the abandonment point, almost exactly where an Inuit informant had indicated on a map to an American investigator a hundred and forty years earlier. The day before the sonar hit, a survey team examining an Inuit tent ring on a nearby island had recovered an iron fitting from a ship's boat davit matching the plans of Erebus, which redirected the search.
HMS Terror was found on 3 September 2016, in Terror Bay, about a hundred kilometres outside the official search grid. It was found because Sammy Kogvik, an Inuk Ranger who had been aboard the search vessel barely a day, mentioned to a crewmate that some six years earlier, on a winter fishing trip, he had seen a mast sticking up through the ice. He had photographed it and then lost the camera, and had told almost nobody, because without proof he did not expect to be believed. The ship sits in twenty-four metres of water with her masts standing and nearly every hatch closed. A survey entered twenty compartments; Crozier's cabin was the best preserved area, with his desk and map cabinets still shut. The cold, sealed conditions may even have preserved paper, which makes it the best remaining prospect of ever finding the ships' logs.
The two wrecks are now a national historic site, the first jointly managed by Inuit and Parks Canada. Kamookak, appointed to the Order of Canada and awarded the Polar Medal, died in 2018. Of the 2014 discovery he said simply that it proved Inuit oral history is strong.
What Actually Killed Them
Treat this as compounding causes rather than a whodunit. They starved and froze. What is genuinely debated is what weakened them first.
Tuberculosis is confirmed. The three men buried at Beechey Island were exhumed in the 1980s, preserved by permafrost, and all three had TB, with pneumonia the likely immediate cause in each case. In cold, cramped ships over three winters it would have spread.
Lead poisoning is the famous answer and it has largely collapsed. The 1980s autopsies found high lead, and isotope work pointed at the solder on the expedition's tinned food, supplied by a contractor who won the contract less than two months before sailing. But a 2015 re-analysis found the crew's lead intake did not rise over the voyage and was not exceptional for Victorians, who absorbed lead constantly from pipes, glazes and paint. A 2018 study imaged lead within bone and tooth microstructure at micro-scale and concluded it did not play a pivotal role. The ships' own novel freshwater system used lead piping, which several researchers now think a likelier source than the cans anyway.
Zinc deficiency is a newer and more elegant candidate. Researchers read the metal content along the length of a toenail and thumbnail from one of the Beechey Island men, producing a week-by-week nutritional timeline of his last months. It showed severe zinc deficiency developing over the voyage, which would have suppressed his immune system and left him open to the TB that killed him. The same analysis found his lead levels normal. The limitation is obvious: it is one man.
Scurvy was almost certainly a factor during the retreat, since lemon juice loses potency over three years, though the skeletal evidence is thin. And botulism, once proposed, has not held up: the same contractor supplied the same tins to many of the ships that searched for Franklin over the following years with no outbreak, and the defect in his cans, poor seals letting air in, argues against the anaerobic bacteria the theory requires.
The honest synthesis: three winters in the ice, endemic tuberculosis, progressive malnutrition, the loss of their commander and a fifth of the crew, and then a hundred and five weakened men dragging boats across sea ice toward a river a thousand kilometres from help, through a landscape whose food they did not know how to take. Lead, zinc and scurvy shape how fast they failed. Cold and starvation are what killed them.
The Misconception That Matters
It is often said that nothing was known until the wrecks were found. That is wrong by a hundred and sixty years. Rae had the essential outline in 1854. McClintock recovered the note in 1859. An American investigator collected extensive Inuit testimony in the 1860s and another expedition walked the ground in the 1870s. The bodies were exhumed in the 1980s and the cut-mark evidence published in 1997. The wrecks confirmed and enriched a picture assembled over generations.
What they mainly proved is that the Inuit accounts had been accurate the whole time. On every testable claim across a hundred and sixty years, Inuit oral history was right: about the starvation, about the cannibalism, about a ship far to the south, about a mast in Terror Bay. The reason it was dismissed is the one Dickens put in print in 1854.
Two smaller corrections worth carrying. Franklin did not lead the death march; he had been dead ten months when it began. And Franklin is commonly credited with discovering the Northwest Passage, a claim largely constructed by his widow's campaign. It was Rae who identified the final navigable link, and Rae's route is essentially the one Amundsen used when he finally sailed the passage in 1903.
Knowledge Check
What does the phrase 'All well' actually date to?+
28 May 1847. Fourteen days later Franklin was dead, and within eleven months twenty-four of the 129 men had died, close to one in five. The note was not a lie; it was the truth as of that morning, and it collapsed inside a fortnight. That gap between the two messages on one sheet of paper is the whole tragedy in miniature.
What is the small word in the note that gives away another death?+
The word late. A marginal line records that the document had been moved from where it was originally deposited by the late Commander Gore. Gore was the officer who had written All well eleven months earlier. He had died too, and had been promoted posthumously by an Admiralty that had no idea.
How far south was HMS Erebus found?+
About a hundred kilometres from where the ships were recorded as abandoned in 1848. That position corroborates Inuit accounts, recorded independently by three separate nineteenth-century expeditions, of a ship in the area they called Utjulik, and implies at least one vessel was re-manned and worked south after the first retreat began.
Why did Sammy Kogvik keep quiet about the mast?+
Because he had no proof and did not expect to be believed. He had photographed it on a winter fishing trip about six years earlier and then lost the camera. He mentioned it in passing after barely a day aboard the search vessel, which diverted on the strength of his account and found HMS Terror.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to the Franklin expedition?+
The ships were trapped in the ice off King William Island in September 1846 and never sailed free. Franklin died in June 1847. In April 1848, after nineteen months beset, the 105 surviving men abandoned the ships and set out south on foot, hauling boats on sledges. None survived. They died of starvation and cold along the coast, weakened by tuberculosis and malnutrition, and in the final stages some of the dead were eaten.
What is the Victory Point note?+
The only written record ever recovered from the expedition, found in a cairn in 1859. It is a pre-printed Admiralty form of the kind normally sealed in bottles and thrown overboard to chart currents. It carries two messages on one sheet: a reassuring note of May 1847 ending with the words All well, and a desperate message scrawled around the margins eleven months later recording Franklin's death, twenty-four dead in total, and the decision to abandon the ships.
Did the Franklin expedition resort to cannibalism?+
Yes. Inuit witnesses told John Rae so in 1854 and Britain refused to believe them. Forensic archaeology has since confirmed it repeatedly: cut marks from metal blades on a femur in 1981, cut marks on ninety-two bones from a single site in 1997, pot polishing from boiling bones in 2015, and in 2024 cut marks on the jaw of Captain James Fitzjames, identified by DNA.
Was lead poisoning from the tins what killed them?+
Probably not, despite being the most famous explanation. Two independent modern studies have undermined it: one found the crew's lead intake did not rise over the expedition and was not unusual for Victorians, and another used synchrotron imaging of bone microstructure and concluded lead did not play a pivotal role. Lead exposure was real and measurable, but the confident story about solder in the cans is no longer supported.
How were the ships finally found?+
By following Inuit oral history. HMS Erebus was located in 2014 in an area Inuit had described for over a century, after decades of interviews by the Inuk historian Louie Kamookak persuaded searchers to look far south of where the ships had been abandoned. HMS Terror was found in 2016 after Sammy Kogvik, an Inuk Ranger, mentioned having seen a mast sticking through the ice in Terror Bay years earlier. The search vessel diverted about a hundred kilometres outside the official grid and found it.
Who was John Rae?+
The Orkney-born Hudson's Bay Company surveyor who learned Arctic travel from Inuit and was the first European to learn what had happened. He reported the Inuit testimony honestly in 1854, including the cannibalism, and his career was destroyed for it. Charles Dickens publicly attacked the credibility of Inuit witnesses, and Rae was the only major Franklin searcher never knighted.
Sources
- ·The Victory Point record, held by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
- ·Francis Leopold McClintock, The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas (1860)
- ·Keenleyside, Bertulli and Fricke, The Final Days of the Franklin Expedition: New Skeletal Evidence, Arctic 50:1 (1997)
- ·Mays and Beattie, Evidence for End-Stage Cannibalism on Sir John Franklin's Last Expedition, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology (2015)
- ·Swanston et al., Franklin expedition lead exposure, PLOS ONE (2018)
- ·Millar, Bowman and Battersby, A re-analysis of the supposed role of lead poisoning, Polar Record 51:3 (2015)
- ·Charles Dickens, The Lost Arctic Voyagers, Household Words, 2 and 9 December 1854, and John Rae's reply in the same journal
- ·Stenton, Fratpietro and Park (2024) on the DNA identification of Captain James Fitzjames
- ·CBC News reporting on Louie Kamookak and on Sammy Kogvik's account of the Terror Bay mast
