#remembering franklin

[indifferent-century]

The memorial to Sir John Franklin in Waterloo Place, London, erected in 1866, imagines what his funeral in the Arctic would have looked like, shortly after his death on June 11, 1847. As per the Victory Point record, from which Britain learned the date of his death, the Erebus and Terror are both shown beset by ice in the background. The men wear a combination of Naval uniforms and Arctic gear, and all seem to have grown beards—a staple of later Victorian representations of the expedition.

Much like West’s Death of Wolfe, Matthew Noble imagined that native people attended the funeral—although shown in dress that does not truly resemble Inuit clothing—but Inuit testimony suggests only that some individuals may have seen the funeral and internment from a distance.

[indifferent-century]

For since that time seven years are past

And many a keen and bitter blast

Blows o’er the grave where those poor seamen fell

Whose dreadful sufferings no tounge can tell

Two versions of “Lady Franklin’s Lament,” from c. 1848 and c. 1852.

[indifferent-century]

Captain Sherard Osborne’s The Career, Last Voyage, and Fate of Captain Sir John Franklin (1860) provides an imaginative outline of Franklin’s death and funeral (of more than usually revolting sentimentality). In this version, Gore and Des Voeux return from depositing the first installment of the Victory Point record to find Franklin on his deathbed, but inform him that they have discovered the last link in the passage on the way to Cape Herschel. 

Thus, Fitzjames, as second in command of Erebus, gives the funeral sermon with a religious metaphor for their own mission: “Oh! Mourn him not, seamen and brother Englishmen! unless ye can point to a more honourable end or a nobler grave. Like another Moses, he fell when his work was accomplished, with the long object of his life in view.”

[indifferent-century]

November 4, 1854 - The Britstol Mercrury chose “The Enquiry” by Charles Mackay as the issue’s poetry selection - juxtaposed alongside several articles about the fate of the Franklin Expedition, reprinted from other newspapers and periodicals.* 

The poetry section was standard for the paper, but given the placement on the page alongside the Franklin articles, I suspect it was deliberately chosen as a eulogy. In the poem, the narrator asks the “winged winds,” the “mighty deep” and the moon whether men can hope for any happier fate than the struggles of life. The poem means to contrast the physical world with the promise of another world in heaven, but in context it specifically evokes the harsh climate and long night against which Franklin’s men would have struggled in the Arctic.** These parallels would likely have been obvious to the Victorian reading public, who had been inundated with articles, images, and exhibits about the nature and dangers of the Arctic for years***. 

I particularly was struck by the stanza where the narrator addresses the ocean itself, and asks whether there is “Some island far away,” “Where sorrow never lives, / And friendship never dies.” What a contrast between that imagined place (perhaps not only evocative of the island of Great Britain, the home the lost men remembered), and the islands of the Arctic, which readers would truly associate now with sorrow and the death of men and their comrades. 

---

*some of which believed the Inuit testimony as reported by John Rae, and some of which were blatantly racist (be forewarned if you choose to read through all the screenshots).   

**I am reminded of Crozier’s eulogy for John Franklin in The Terror! 

***I recommend both Arctic Spectacles by Russell Potter and White Horizon by Jen Hill for further reading on this subject.