In an earlier post on this blog, we talked about the English attempts to locate Sir John Franklin, unsuccessful searcher after the Northwest Passage. Franklin left England in 1845 with two ships, the Erebus and Terror, on his second attempt to locate the Passage, one of the rocs’ eggs of nineteenth century navigation. The second voyage resulted in a worse disaster than the first — Franklin and some of his men had staggered back overland from the first attempt; the second resulted in the total loss of both ships and men.
The fate of the Franklin expedition was a source of considerable mystery, since the ships were merely listed as ‘missing’ for years. Multiple voyages were launched in search of Franklin and his ships, including the expedition Robert Goodsir shipped with.
The English were not the only ones going in search of Franklin, however. Noted American explorer Elisha Kent Kane shipped out on each of the Grinnell Expeditions — the first in 1850 and the second in 1853. The first voyage did result in the location of the first winter camp the Franklin expedition made during their attempted retreat. Kane himself experienced the full hardship of contemporary Arctic exploration, including scurvy and having to abandon icebound ships and retreat across ice and wintry land to safety. He successfully escaped the ice and wrote his memoir of the expeditions in the later 1850s.
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