Franklin's Lost Expedition - Lost

Lost

The expedition set sail from Greenhithe, England, on the morning of 19 May 1845, with a crew of 24 officers and 110 men. The ships stopped briefly in Stromness Harbour in the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, and from there they sailed to Greenland with HMS Rattler and a transport ship, Barretto Junior.

At the Whalefish Islands in Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, 10 oxen carried by the transport ship were slaughtered for fresh meat; supplies were transferred to Erebus and Terror, and crew members wrote their last letters home. Letters written on board told how Franklin banned swearing and drunkenness. Before the expedition's final departure, five men were discharged and sent home on Rattler and Barretto Junior, reducing the ships' final crew size to 129. The expedition was last seen by Europeans in late July 1845, when Captain Dannett of the whaler Prince of Wales and Captain Robert Martin of the whaler Enterprise encountered Terror and Erebus in Baffin Bay, waiting for good conditions to cross to Lancaster Sound.

Over the next 150 years, other expeditions, explorers, and scientists would piece together what happened next. Franklin's men wintered in 1845–46 on Beechey Island, where three crew members died and were buried. Terror and Erebus became trapped in ice off King William Island in September 1846 and never sailed again. According to a note dated 25 April 1848, and left on the island by Fitzjames and Crozier, Franklin had died on 11 June 1847; the crew had wintered on King William Island in 1846–47 and 1847–48, and the remaining crew had planned to begin walking on 26 April 1848 toward the Back River on the Canadian mainland. Nine officers and fifteen men had already died; the rest would die along the way, most on the island and another 30 or 40 on the northern coast of the mainland, hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of Western civilization.