The Erebus and Terror sailed on May 19, 1845, carrying 134 men. When the ships reached Greenland, five men were invalided home. The ships sailed north through Baffin Bay, the stretch of water separating Baffin Island and Greenland. A whaling ship reported having seen the Erebus and Terror tethered to an iceberg on June 25, 1845. It was the last reported sighting of the expedition.
It had been hoped that word of the expedition might come as early as 1846 - possibly by way of Alaska. The most optimistic expected the ships to navigate the North West Passage and make their report from the Bering Strait, the waters separating Alaska and Russia. No word came in 1846, nor was anything heard in 1847. The Admiralty remained unconcerned. It was not unusual for Arctic expeditions to remain in the Arctic for several years. In fact, John Ross, leading an expedition in 1829, had been forced to spend four winters in the Arctic. He had miraculously returned, with the loss of only three men.
The example of Ross' expedition served to reassure many in the Admiralty that Franklin would eventually return. Ross himself began to have misgivings early in 1847. It was crucial, he argued, that the expedition be found that summer. Ross' advice was ignored for nearly a year. Finally, in early 1848, officials began to express their concern publicly. In March 1848, the Admiralty offered a 20,000-pound reward for Franklin's rescue. The search was to take place both by sea and by land - an overland expedition from the mouth of the Mackenzie River was to explore east along the Arctic coast. James Clark Ross, with two large ships, left in May 1848 in hopes of following Franklin's route through the waters northwest of Baffin Bay. Some suspected that Ross was not as interested in looking for Franklin, as in looking for the Passage. The 1848 expeditions found neither the Passage nor any evidence of Franklin. Nothing was heard of the expeditions themselves until November 1849, when they returned. They reported finding nothing. The death toll associated with Franklin's expedition was beginning to add up. While Ross had found no evidence of Franklin's crew, he had to report that six of his own men had died during the search attempt.
The year 1850 would see six more expeditions sent out. In August, the graves of three men who had died in 1846 were found on Beechey Island. The men had been part of the Franklin party. It was now known that Franklin had made it through Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait, but he left no message telling where he was going. One of the vessels which had sailed in 1850 was the Investigator, under the command of Robert McClure. Rather than sail to Baffin Bay, McClure was to begin his search from the west, going through the Bering Strait and exploring the coast of Alaska. In October 1850 McClure discovered the North West Passage, the elusive prize everyone was searching for. It would not be until October 1853 however, that news of his discovery would reach London. Shortly after receiving the news, the Admiralty officially announced that it would remove the names of Franklin's crew from its books. The Navy was officially declaring the men dead and now intended to abandon the search.
Only in 1854 did real evidence of the fate of Franklin's expedition come to light. John Rae, an Arctic explorer working for the Hudson's Bay Company, wintered on the Boothia Peninsula, north of Hudson Bay. In April 1854 he heard a story from an Eskimo about a party of white men who had starved to death some years earlier. The man who told the story even had a cap band which he said had been found near the place where the deaths occurred. Rae did not press the Eskimo to take him to the place, but did offer a reward for any artifacts found where the deaths supposedly had occurred. In the fall, Eskimos began bringing him artifacts that were clearly from Franklin's expedition. Rae's evidence was sufficient to allow him to collect the now-reduced 10,000-pound reward offered by Parliament.
John Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Franklin, through all the disappointments, kept pressuring Parliament and the Navy to continue the search. She purchased the Fox, a small steam boat for 2,000 pounds and hired Leopold M'Clintock to command, in one last effort to find out what had happened to her husband. In contrast to the129 in Franklin's party, there were only 25 men aboard the Fox. Jane Franklin wanted M'Clintock to search the area around King William Island, the one area not covered by previous searches. It was not until late June 1857 that M'Clintock was ready to leave, too late in the year to avoid being caught in the winter ice. In April 1858 the ice which had trapped him began to bread up. However, it would not be until July that any route so far north would be sufficiently clear to allow him to reach King William Island. While ice seemed to block whatever route M'Clintock chose, in September he was able to find a place to anchor on the north of the Boothia Peninsula, not far from his intended destination. In February 1859 M'Clintock, traveling south along the Boothia coast, encountered some Eskimos. One wore a naval button and M'Clintock offered a reward for any relics they would bring him. The Eskimos brought in a number of relics and told of a group of white men who had starved on an island some years before. Eskimos also remembered two ships, one of which had sunk.
It was in May 1859, while exploring the coast of King William Island, that M'Clintock found a human skeleton. From the shreds of clothing it was clear that the skeleton was that of a seaman. M'Clintock had ordered Lieutenant William Hobson to explore the north coast of King William Island. While M'Clintock was exploring to the south, Hobson had found a cairn containing a single sheet of paper with two messages. On May 28, 1847, the expedition was doing well, according to the first note. Franklin however, had died within a month of the first note, in June 1847, according to the second message. The message did not say how Franklin had died. The second note, which was dated April 27, 1848, provided other gloomier details. Twenty-four were dead and the survivors had decided to head south, toward the Great Fish River. The note indicated that the Erebus and Terror had gotten frozen in the ice in September 1846, but had been unable to break free.
The members of Franklin's expedition had not been up to an overland journey. M'Clintock found more evidence as he searched King William Island. Franklin's retreating party had abandoned a 650 pound sledge with a 700-pound river boat on top. The party had also left behind those too weak to travel. Inside the boat M'Clintock found two skeletons, the remains of those left behind. Those who continued however were not strong enough to survive the journey south and died along the way. Having discovered what evidence existed of the expedition's fate, M'Clintock sailed for home, reaching England in September 1859. The search for the expedition was over.
By the time M'Clintock began exploring King William Island, much of the evidence about the expedition had disappeared. What he did find however, was at least sufficient to tell where the expedition had gone and how most had died. From the evidence which was found, it is believed that disease, particularly scurvy, was what doomed most members of the expedition. Lead poisoning, from solder in the tinned food cans, also may have played a part. The classic method of preserving meat with salt destroyed much of the vitamin C contained in the meat and the daily ration of lemon juice was insufficient to combat scurvy in the Arctic. Fresh meat, which could have been obtained by hunting game, or even bought from the Eskimos who lived in the area, would have supplied the necessary vitamin. Unfortunately, the expedition looked down on native methods of survival as well as the foods that enabled the Eskimos to survive. The lack of vitamin C was what led to scurvy; it was the length of time Arctic crews had to endure the disease that made it fatal. It was not until the second year of many Arctic voyages that the worst symptoms of scurvy would appear. Many expeditions had escaped by returning before scurvy appeared. The Franklin expedition, living almost exclusively on salted meat, was forced to remain in the Arctic longer than was safe. Once that point in time was reached, the crew began dying off. Ross, in 1829, had survived four winters in the Arctic, but he adopted an Eskimo diet and had relied on Eskimo hunters to supply his expedition with meat. Ironically, Ross' expedition had survived in the very region of the Arctic that would later kill the Franklin party- the land around the Boothia Peninsula and King William Island.
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