Frontispiece from An Arctic Voyage, showing the Devil's Thumb taken from an original sketch by Robert Goodsir.
Robert Goodsir did not, however, technically go in search of Franklin himself but, rather, in search of his own brother who had embarked with Franklin on his ill-fated 1845 voyage from England to discover the Northwest Passage. Sir John Franklin was a noted — and notoriously unlucky — Arctic explorer whose last voyage ended in complete disaster: his two ships were missing for over ten years and even when the deaths of Franklin and his crew were confirmed, the true circumstances of the horrific end to the mission were elided from the public version. British officers were not meant to turn cannibal, no matter how desperate the straits.
Before the loss of both ships was confirmed, though, multiple missions were launched in search of Franklin and his ships, the Erebus and the Terror. The Royal Navy was responsible for several of them and Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John’s second wife, was responsible for others. While Goodsir mentions Lady Jane, it is unclear from his narrative if she gave financial support to this mission as she did to several others. Goodsir’s ship was captained by William Penny, who went out twice as a ship’s captain in the search for Franklin in the Advice, the ship Goodsir sailed on in 1849, and the Lady Franklin in 1850. When Goodsir shipped out in the late 1840s, Franklin’s fate was not yet confirmed and many still held out hope that he had found the Northwest Passage and was simply engaged in a long northern circumnavigation of Canada and would still turn up in Alaska, Hawaii, or California.
Goodsir, in his account titled An Arctic Voyage to Baffin’s Bay and Lancaster Sound, discusses the weather, the Arctic wildlife, meetings with the Inuit, and life on board ship. The Advice touched land at Greenland and Goodsir makes a very full description of the locals, including Danish settlers and missionaries as well as the Inuit tribespeople living near the coast. Goodsir is also clear, as the ship begins to work its way farther north, about the dangers into which they are sailing, not the least of which is the Arctic ice. The ship was in momentary danger of being crushed between floes as they formed or being caught in a crush and frozen in for the winter, a process the vessel might or might not survive. Goodsir seems to have served his ship as medical officer, making mention of tending wounded sailors or being requested by passing whaling ships for sick or hurt men.
Goodsir’s narrative is a fascinating account of a voyage into the Arctic at a time when relatively little of the area was known; the coastline was not fully mapped and the water was not well understood by all sailors, let alone all captains.
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