After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - HMS Terror: Cursed Arctic Expedition

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Was ever a ship more aptly named? In 1845, HMS Terror (and its forgettably named sister ship HMS Erebus) set off from Victorian Britain. Their quest was to discover the fabled Northwest passage through the Arctic ice. The crew were heroes in waiting. Yet by the end the rules that govern life on board Royal Navy vessels collapsed into chaos and cannibalism.Maddy tells Anthony this story about life in the Royal Navy, Arctic winters, badly written poetry, and the thin line that separates us from horror.Written by Maddy Pelling. Mixed by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here.

It's April 1848 and we're standing on the ice-encrusted deck of a ship. Its engine has long been quiet and its propeller frozen in the pack ice that surrounds us. For months we've been living under polar night, 24 hours of darkness, punctuated only by the moon's eerie reflection on endless snow. It's so cold that were you to remove the woollen balaclava from around your face, it would likely rip your skin away with it. Around us, a weary crew of men are gathered, their faces barely visible under layers of clothing are gaunt from hunger and the cold,

and their rasping breath lingers in the air. At their head stands Captain Francis Crozier, a once imposing presence, now reduced to a haggard stoop. Beside him, Commander James Fitzjames is giving instructions. The decision has been made to abandon ship in a desperate bid for survival. The decision has been made to abandon ship in a desperate bid for survival. What started as an ambitious Royal Navy expedition, led by Britain's finest and most experienced, has turned to disaster. But worse is yet to come. What lies ahead is starvation, scurvy, pneumonia, tuberculosis and lead poisoning.

As supplies dwindle and food becomes scarcer, the rules of order that have governed life on board HMS Terra and its sister HMS Erebus will collapse into chaos. I'm Dr Maddy Pelling and I'm Dr Anthony Delaney and this is After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. We have such a fantastic case this. I can't wait to get into it. It's such a strange, unsettling story. There are so many unanswered questions about it. So do you know anything about the story of HMS Terror, Anthony? I mean, the first thing that strikes me is that the setting is really evocative, right? Like that being in the ice, in the dark. it's cold, it's bleak, it's kind of they're left to their own devices out in the middle of nowhere.

There's so much human drama. And of course, famously, this story has been dramatized by the BBC in the series The Terror, which I'm sure many listeners will have seen. I was a huge fan of that. And I think, for me, that was the route into this story. I didn't know much about the history until I watched that on TV. So it's a really remarkable story of human survival or the struggle to survive. It's no spoilers, but not everyone's going to make it. They don't make it out. They certainly don't. So should we make a start on some of the background information?

Go on, tell me, what are they doing there in the first place? Why have they taken this trip? It seems like a very thankless journey to make. So this is the 1840s, the late 1840s. And it's an expedition that has these two ships, HMS Terror, HMS Erebus, that are sent by the British Admiralty in search of the Northwest Passage. So the Northwest Passage is this really vital sea route between the Atlantic and the Pacific that people assume it exists

and they've been searching for it for at least a century at this point. And if it is found, it will provide a route for trade, basically, and it opens up the whole world. So it's really kind of crucial that they find it. People are really, really keen from an economic point of view, Britain is really keen to be the nation that finds it and the nation that controls it as well. So when we're talking about this period in time, we're looking at the 1840s, right? So what do we know is happening in society more generally at this time as this ship is getting

ready to go on this expedition? happening in society more generally at this time as this ship is getting ready to go on this expedition. So in Britain, we have Queen Victoria on the throne. She's been on the throne for three years at this point. In 1840, she marries Albert famously. Britain, I suppose, is looking back at the wars that have happened in the previous decades at the opening of the 19th century, and it's still kind of coming to terms with the defeat of Napoleon. And, you know, Victoria is, she's presiding over an empire that will come to be described as an empire on which the sun never sets. You know, this is the beginning of the British Empire in the 19th century. It's the empire on steroids, basically. I think a lot of people, even today, look back on that period as kind of this

zenith, right, or heading towards a zenith. And for other people, it's an incredibly problematic, incredibly tense time in, as you were talking about, the development of that empire. And that kind of juxtaposition is present even then, and the kind of expectations and regulations that are happening throughout society. Like, for instance, because we're going to be dealing with a crew of men on board this ship, expectations for masculinity have really kind of hardened after the Georgian period. Absolutely. You know, I think there have been decades of war leading up to this point, and it has, I guess, hardened ideas of masculinity. It's a kind of pared back masculinity in some ways i suppose compared to

the decorative elements of of how maybe a georgian even a georgian army officer or a naval officer would have looked in this period and the these this idea of manhood and empire is absolutely interlinked and this is something that comes up in the story a lot. You know, there's this kind of, this weight on these men's shoulders that they are carrying the hopes of Britain, I suppose, off to the Arctic with them. They're there to represent their country and to bring their country glory and to get the job done looking for the Northwest Passage,

which is going to bring in all this opportunity for wealth and trade that Britain needs. And I presume these ships, I mean, they're going into fairly tumultuous waters or ice particularly, but like the ships are often reused in expeditions like this. So these are not ships specifically built, like, or are they? Have they been adapted? Are they built specifically for this trip? I assume they've been around for a while. So they have been around for a while. They're actually, they're relatively old at this point and they're built for a world that doesn't exist anymore.

So they're basically built as bombships. Now, bombships are vessels that are used to fling ammunition onto the land. And they've been used since, I think, 1812. But they've been all over the world at this point already. So they're really, they've proven themselves, these vessels. You know, they are kind of floating microcosms of the empire of Britishness, and they represent this kind of military might, the generations before. And so they come with this history, they've been down to the Antarctic, they've actually been to the Arctic before as well, which is where we are at

this point. They've been to Australia, they've been all over. And a lot of the crew on them, including Franklin, who is the expedition leader, they have used these ships before. They've been on these ships for many years off and on. So they're familiar environments in that way. They're really emblems of military might, of colonial prowess, imperial expansion, all of that. And of course, this is absolutely what they're doing, looking for the Northwest Passage. It's putting Britain on the map, imposing it. Yeah, even more so. So you mentioned Franklin there in terms of the crew. Who else are we dealing with? What kind of size or what size of the crew? Mind you, you mentioned

it's over 100 men, right? Who else is on there leading this expedition yeah so so john franklin is in charge and he has 129 men under him so that's a mixture of sailors and officers franklin himself has served at the battle of trafalgar so he is quite an old man at this point and he has i think kind of quite a mixed reputation back in britain i think there's a famous incident where he is in, it's either the Arctic or the Antarctic, and he sees a mountain range that he names. He's discovered it. He's associated with it. Turns out it was clouds. Right. Yeah. So you can name a bunch of clouds, I guess. I mean, they're not going to stay in place, but good for him. Yeah, so it's a bit disastrous in terms of his reputation. And he has this really powerful wife at home who really is like social champion.

She's very ambitious for him. And she is the one who is the sort of the driving force behind this expedition. She pushes for patrons to put money to back it. And she gets her husband on this trip. So that's Franklin. He's really well liked on board. So we have really early correspondence from the crew when they're leaving, they go past Greenland

and that's the last time we have their side of the correspondence before, after that point, there is no one to take the letters. And interestingly, the correspondence from friends and family becomes one-sided, which is again, so evocative. But we do know that he was really well respected. Now, the other person who is the second in command is Francis Crozier, who is an Irish born officer. And I know that he joined the Navy at age 13, which isn't that unusual, but it's quite remarkable for the present day. Now, Crozier is one of the people that I know a little bit about before you kind of introduced the topic, because Crozier being Irish, I'm Irish,

there is a statue in County Down to Crozier. And I always thought the little that I did know about him, I always thought it was a bit odd because he's surrounded by polar bears. And it strikes me that he would probably prefer not to be memorialised with polar bears. It's a bit on the nose. Yeah, it's a little bit, gosh, just put him sitting by a fire or something. But I think his Irishness is really interesting here because from what I understand, he suffered because of his Irishness on board, right? Because he was second in command, if I'm correct, like correct me if I'm wrong here,

but I think he was second in command. But they didn't give him all the responsibilities of the second in command. So, for instance, as I understand it, he wasn't allowed to pick the crew, which usually is what they can do. Instead, that went to Fitzjames. Am I right there? Yeah, James Fitzjames, who is another commander on the expedition. I mean, I think that's so interesting that his Irishness was obviously an intrinsic part of his identity, but it's also maybe a barrier in his career. For many people on board, this expedition in particular marked, it's a real turning point in their careers, and it's a way that they're going to prove themselves.

And I think Crozi is no different in that regard, that he's there to take this quite incredible opportunity, and hopefully they're going to make their name, finding the Northwest Passage. They don't. Yeah, no, they don't get there. The interesting thing about it is the timing too, right? Like, because it's 1845, so it's right at the beginning of the Great Irish Famine. So he is, and County Down would have been quite affected

by the famine as it was unfolding there, but he escapes that. He has his own trials to undertake, but obviously he doesn't know that. So 1845 is when we set off, right? Yeah, so we set off. And it's obviously there's already tensions on board. There are class tensions between officers and sailors, even if Franklin himself is popular, that there are these sort of intrinsic hierarchies that at the moment are governing that life on board the ship.

And it's a way of regulating everyone's behavior and in that sense you know a ship is very much a very concentrated microscopic version of society at home and so interesting that Crozier's position in that maybe doesn't quite fit in and that's fascinating so they set off and like I say we have these these letters these letters that go from Greenland and then it becomes one-sided so what happens next is kind of a bit of a mystery they spend several winters in the Arctic and very quickly the pack ice comes around the ships and the ships do get stuck which is where we started right with with your narrative about we are stuck on the ice, it is perpetual nighttime, freezing cold, like, you know, dangerously cold conditions,

taking off skin when taking off clothing, like it's horrendous. It is horrendous. The initial moment at which they're stuck in the ice, they expect that. That's part of the expedition to begin with. It's not a disaster, but things are about to go downhill quite considerably. And by the end, all 129 men will be lost. Right, go on. Tell me the next bit. In the early days of the expedition, Erebus and Terra worked their way north until winter halted their progress. On board was enough tinned food to last three years, as well as chickens, sheep, pigs, hens, 7,000 pounds of tobacco, a dog called Neptune, and even a monkey gifted

by Franklin's wife. But soon they entered the bleakest and most remote territory, referred to by the Inuit as Tunanik, meaning the back and beyond. There, under glowing skies and atop a treacherous ocean, the men found themselves alone but for local wildlife, seals, narwhals, bears. As winter set in, the ships froze in the ice. Unmoving for months, the crew battling boredom in the darkness. At night, temperatures would reach minus 48 degrees Celsius, so that even under thick woolen overcoats, the men's sweat turned to ice. Life was precarious, and by June 1847, Franklin was dead,

along with nine other officers and 15 men. By the following spring, the mysterious decision had been made to leave the vessels behind and go on foot in search of salvation. To this day, the events that led to this choice remain unknown. That is fascinating. I mean, for a crew to abandon a ship, something has significantly gone wrong. That is not something that they are going to do just off, you know, just on a whim. So what do you think did go wrong? Well, essentially, it's really, really, really difficult to reconstruct it because we don't have any of the paper records really from the ship that you'd expect.

have any of the paper records really from the ship that you'd expect there are no journals there are no letters there are no log books pretty much everything has been lost so there's none of these voices we don't hear any of the opinions of the crew we don't hear anything of these tensions that we identified at the beginning that are maybe developing as conditions get more and more difficult. There's no sense of what happens here. The only piece of information that we have, and it's a really remarkable one, is it's literally a piece of paper. It's like one of the very few pieces of paper to be recovered. And it's known today as the Victory Point Note.

So this was discovered several years after the expedition, after it became clear the expedition had failed. And it's left in a stone cairn that had been built by a previous expedition, I think in 1821, I think. And it's a piece of paper. There is, it's a form essentially, a naval form. It has printed text on it and some handwriting. And it's obviously been used twice on two separate dates, and that is absolutely crucial.

So the first part of the note says, everything's going swell. The words, all well, are underlined several times for emphasis. It's all fine. There are potentially a few people who've already died at this point, I think. It's somewhat to be expected on an expedition like this. Yeah, disease, obviously scurvy is a big problem. But there's no disaster. There's no catastrophe that's happened yet. All is fine. Franklin is still in charge. Interestingly, he doesn't sign the paper himself, but he is still

in place. Still there, still alive. in place as the leader of the expedition. However, the second entry on the note is so poignant, and it's very clear at that point, everything's gone wrong. It's in a more scrawled hand, and it's written on the edges of the paper around the form. And so it's literally going outside the lines. We're already losing some of that order and regulation of the Navy and the ways in which you're expected to report things, to record things. And the note basically says, so it's dated the 25th of April, 1848. The first note is dated from the following year. So a whole year has passed. And it basically says the Erebus and the Terror have been deserted for three days. So what's happened in that year? Franklin has died for a start, along with, I think it's nine officers and 15 men. So that's not great. What's happened there? What has killed them all is it disease is it an accident

is it a bear like we don't we don't know um what has happened it's a really can you imagine having to take that decision as a group of people who have been ensconced together in these two ships over years now at this point this has become become your family. It has become your understanding of what society and culture is in a microcosm of, you know, as you were talking about earlier, about what life is like back in Britain. Well, this is your Britain on these two ships. And the fear that would have been involved in abandoning those ships on an individual, on a human level. It's kind of sometimes it's very easy to just remember that we're left with these two great

hulking vessels in the middle of ice and surrounded by the cold and the dark. But actually, there are people climbing down off those ships. They are going to be afraid. They're going to be, you know, unspeakably cold. And some of them, some of them will probably have known that that was the last journey they were going to make. On a human level, these are very, you know, it's easy for us to kind of sit back into it and think, oh, this kind of big history on these big ships, and these are people, distant people, 150 plus years ago. But actually, these people had emotions. These people had feelings.

These people were scared. These people had wives, children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, whatever it is. And as they're setting foot off of these ships, they must be thinking of those things. They must be thinking of those people. They must be thinking of home. They must be thinking of how amazing it would be to sit by a fire back home again. And I don't think we can underestimate that kind of emotional, the history of the emotions of those people that were walking off those ships.

And while the kind of vessels themselves have been somewhat preserved and there are certain items that have been recovered, those emotions kind of just get forgotten in the kind of historical archive, whereas actually those were tangible things to those people at that time and really important and heartbreaking as well. It makes the history all the more relatable, all the more present tense, I think. Yeah, it really does. You know, these ships were people's homes. They were the spaces in which they worked, but also the spaces in which they lived. They exercised on board the deck, often accompanied by music from an organ grinder, or sometimes they sang their own songs that they'd made up.

They would do things like amateur dramatics. When these ships were in the Antarctic, they were strapped together and were used as a ballroom. One ship had the food and the drinks and the other was for dancing. And so these are sociable spaces these are spaces that have tangible lived in experiences and one of the things so we'll go on to talk about the ships today and where they are and what's left on them because they do survive um the the people who who lived in these spaces left all kinds of objects behind so things that weren't necessary on the ice things that were too

heavy to carry so we have things like musical instruments we've got toothbrushes we've got these fine dinner plates cups and saucers in the officers quarters we've got all these things that just make up a life that people brought with them to accentuate their personalities and what is a regimented space to accentuate their social class, whatever it was, all these precious things, they had to leave them. There was a, I think I remember reading at some point in the past about a pair of gloves that were really badly made, but had hearts on the palms as if like, you know, a love, the love of that person, the partner of that person had made these not the most skillful gloves.

But, you know, these are all things that tie you to home. So it's this kind of real, I mean, life at sea is difficult enough as it is. Life in the polar Arctic or Antarctic, it's going to be more extreme again. And then to have to leave these things is just, you know, it's heartbreaking. But so they leave the ship. And where do we go from here? So just to recap, at this point, we've got 129 men, a number of them are now dead, including Franklin. They have brought this archive of incredible things with them and things that would, you know, give them strength

in a task that they believed was bringing glory to Britain and bringing glory to themselves. And something has gone wrong. We know that from the victory point note. And the decision, I think the decision to leave would have been absolutely crushing for every single man on board there that there would be a feel feeling of letting down your family your nation the other men around you and so i think what happens next is all the more tragic for that the fact that they're so invested in this mission and it goes so horribly wrong right tell us money what happens next Of the 105 men who set out across the ice under Captain Crozier, none would survive the march south. Weakened by starvation, by scurvy, pneumonia, tuberculosis, lead poisoning,

they began to split off into smaller groups as supplies dwindled and food became scarcer. At home in Britain, Lady Franklin, wife to the expedition's original leader, was becoming increasingly concerned. By 1847, three years after Erebus and Terra had embarked on their voyage, she began to petition for a search party, even asking the Tsar of Russia and the US president for help. By the 1850s, the first team arrived in the north. What they found was truly shocking. Among the scattered and preserved remains of the crew were mutilated body parts, some hacked with knives and others placed in cooking pots.

For around 30 of the crew, as witnessed by Inuit on their journey south, it seems cannibalism had become a last miserable resort. Catherine of Aragon Anne Boleyn Jane Seymour Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII,

who shaped and changed England forever. six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Wow. I mean, that is an intense history, an intense naval history. But one of the things that struck me about that part of the story is Lady Franklin, actually. Like, she is determined. And you had said at the outset of this conversation that she was raising money for the trip. She was, you know, acting as as as kind of a not a sponsor, but she was, you know, overseeing the administration of the ship before they left.

So now that they've gone missing, she has taken a pretty active role, too. She absolutely does. You know, she's she's convinced quite early on that something's gone wrong. She knows that they have three years worth of supplies aboard the ship. And when the three years are up or coming to a close, she's increasingly concerned. And what is so touching, I think, is that she obviously had such deep love for her husband and clearly missed him a lot despite her ambition for his career you know she did want him home safely something that i read which i just found this

so poignant and so sad is that she continued to write to him well into the 1850s after the point where these remains these human remains are found long after that she still addressed the letters to him she includes things like gossip from lond life. She includes information about her life, what she's been up to, what she hopes he's up to, that he's safe. It's kind of like a ghostly correspondence, right? Because she will have known, well, at some level, she will likely have known that he was dead. I think so. It's this, it's almost like a kind of a prayer or a meditation by writing it to him, right? She's kind of evoking him. She's allowing him to haunt her space again, because she can never be with him again. So it's this really, I don't know, it's really tangible,

again, emotional. Sometimes we forget about these emotions, but you can't when these people are writing these letters. That's incredible. Yeah. And he becomes a kind of ghost of her own making through the letters that she kind of manifests him. And I wonder as well, what point in that correspondence he becomes a ghost for her? You know, at what point does she realize he is probably dead? Yeah. And does she ever fully give up hope? Yeah.

So, you know, I don't think he's wandering around the Arctic now, but... He has his like iPhone out with his Google Maps going, why? Why can't I find one? No signal. Yeah. So by 1854, the first search parties are arriving and they obviously discover these really, really grisly finds. And these are some of the elements of the story that have kind of made it this enduring, I guess, horror story. It is a horror story. It's a story of absolute human failure and the lengths that some will go to to try and survive. Maddy has very kindly given us some quotes from people who were on that rescue mission. So I'm just going to read a little bit of one of the things that Maddy provided first thing this morning.

And this is a great way to start your day, by the way. From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative as a means of sustaining life. A few of the unfortunate men must have survived until the arrival of the wildfowl, say until the end of May, as shots were heard and fresh bones and feathers of geese were noticed near the scene of the sad event maddie i'm dread to ask but tell us what that actually means what what are they saying what what is in those kettles so this is a letter written by dr john ray who's part of the the search expedition and unfortunately he does mean that there are human remains in the the

kettles are cooking vessels you know put over the fire there are bodies found underneath an upturned rowing boat that are trying to shelter and these these poor people these poor men are preserved in the moment of death you know and they have all their clothes still on them. They have objects that they have bothered to bring or that they were able to bring with them from the ships. And the scenes, you know, the tent is still up. The people are still by the fire. It's a really quite gruesome and ghoulish discovery. And I think it was incredibly shocking when news of this came

back to Britain. Dr. Ray's account is, you know, his words are published. And it was as shocking as it is to us today. I mean, still, it's hard. It's difficult reading. But in terms of the news reaching Britain in 1854, 1855, this is catastrophic for the reputation of the Navy, for obviously Lady Franklin, who's been so hopeful in kind of putting forth this narrative that they're all going to be found safely. The evidence of cannibalism is only in the small number of men that are found. And we do know that earlier on in the expedition, when those first men died, around the same time that Franklin himself died,

a lot of them were buried properly. So, you know, it's not that it was all chaos from the outset. And indeed, some of those bodies that are buried from the earliest parts, the earliest years of the expedition, some of those are completely preserved and have been exhumed since. And you can see photographs of them on Google Images for better or worse, you know, and they are human remains. They are so incredibly tangible. These people, these bodies haven't really decomposed you can see the facial hair you can see the teeth you

can get a sense of the person when they were alive you can imagine them as animated people yeah and it just again it it just brings home that human element it just makes them seem like real people and you can imagine yourself in in the the snow-covered boots i guess i mean obviously be wary if you're googling those images they do exist they are online they are as maddie says images of human remains but you are also listening to after dark so there's a good likelihood that you're going straight to google them right now but either way one of the things that struck me is some of them are actually identifiable in the artwork through their remains. I have never seen that in any historical event or time period before. There was one particular, and I can't

remember the gentleman's name, but it showed a picture of what remained of his body and a portrait that had been painted before he left. And you could clearly tell it was the same person. And I have never experienced that before. And in that sense, you know, we talked about Franklin haunting his wife, but like even through Google, even, you know, whatever, 200 years later, 250 years later, it's a haunting image in a real kind of present tense sense again. And it's this thing, that's one of the things that's so fascinating about history and about tales like this. They can, it becomes a very present tense thing sometimes. We always think about history in the past tense.

But actually, when you're face to face with human remains and you're looking at the portrait and you're looking at the clothes, they're buried in their clothes and you can see those clothes. They're really intact. Then it becomes incredibly present tense. And those people somehow inhabit 2023, even though they've been dead for quite a long time. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think, as well, what's so fascinating about this expedition, in particular, in the 1840s, is that the whole crew is photographed before they leave. And it exists in that strange time. Okay, we are into the Victorian, we're a decade into the Victorian period at this point. But that technology is still relatively new and expensive and you know they are they go there on

ships that were used in wars in the 1810s and yet they're part of this modern world that's emerging and they're frozen in in time in that way. Literally, that's, yeah. Yeah, literally frozen, yeah. So thinking about where we are today then, what has there been, have the wrecks been located? I think you said they have. What is happening with kind of any analysis? Have we found everything that there is to find?

What status are we looking at now in terms of the terror and the Erebus? Yeah, so in 2014 and 2016, the wrecks of Erebus and terror respectively were discovered. So they are now under the water. They're not frozen in the ice anymore. They are underwater. They've been investigated by Parks Canada and the Inuit Heritage Trust. And they kind of have joint ownership, joint control of those sites. But because of the nature of this case and the fact that the men abandoned the ships, there is some debate that some of them went back to the ships, by the way. So that's another kind of complicated layer.

But the fact that the entire crew went onto the ice and then split up into different groups means that the evidence of what happened is scattered over a vast area and an area that is a changing landscape. You know, also thinking about how climate change might affect that in the future, that all this evidence is frozen. But how long will that be the case? I don't know. And I think I think the takeaway with the material that is left for me, it's not so much the focus on the cannibalism and these horror elements but actually it's these objects that speak to the hopefulness of human beings you know you mentioned the really badly made gloves um they're both left-handed by the way which i don't think means the person was left-handed but just really really just really badly made but you know

they have these hand-stitched hearts and they've those objects are actually they were found on a rock they've been left out in the sun to dry and so it's almost like someone's going to come back for them you know and i think that the connection that those represent to the people back home to human individual relationships but that kind of wider bridge between the expedition and Britain, I think is really interesting. Things like one of the unfortunate men who was found, I think, in the scene with the cannibalism. In his pocket, he had a little notebook not written in his handwriting. So something that belonged to someone else in the crew, either something that he had been gifted by someone that he maybe someone dying had asked him to take it back home with him.

Maybe he's taken it off a body, we don't know. But it's full of poetry. And these are original compositions. Some don't make sense. There's some very odd things in there, and they're kind of a mystery in their own right. You didn't say it was good poetry. But, you know, some of it, and interestingly,

some of the lines potentially may have been composed for franklin's funeral quite early on they reference things that you know suggest maybe that's what they were used for but i think you know this this human compulsion to create art and to be hopeful and to yearn for home and love and all of that in this this environment of absolute adversity and and what becomes real horror i think that's the the takeaway really so in terms of the ships themselves they have been discovered there have been dives to them and there's so many unanswered questions the other the other fascinating thing i think about through the attempts to reconstruct the scenario that of them leaving the ship

and what played out afterwards. It comes with the scientific analysis, I guess, of lots of the DNA because, of course, the bodies are so well preserved. The teeth, the nails, in some cases the hair can be used. And it's been tested to look at things like the nutrition levels in the body, that kind of thing. So many listeners will know that there is a debate around whether the crew were suffering from lead poisoning. So the supplies aboard the ship, there was a meat packing company in London that the Admiralty paid and they packed the meat into metal cylinders that were sealed with lead. And of course,

the lead seeped into the food there's a question there about you know what what that will do to a human being eating that over up to a three-year period that has been challenged recently so there's there's some suggestion that actually the levels of lead in their bodies wouldn't have been any different from anyone else in britain at the time and that other malnutrition other diseases compounded the levels of lead in their body towards the end of their lives and it becomes more visible in some way I'm no scientist but but you know that that's a possibility I gather um so there are lots of questions there about what exactly caused a lot of the deaths of these people. You know, is it disease? Is it just starvation? Why are they at the point where they're starving?

There's, yeah, all kinds of mysterious questions. And the one for me that has just a huge question mark over it, and I think this is so evocative and absolutely needs more work to be done on it, is that in some of the DNA that was taken from these bodies, we're able to establish that they are European humans. But in a lot of cases, the Y chromosome is missing. Now, this could be that early DNA testing had some issues where the Y chromosome wasn't as visible, or it might be

that some of these individuals were female. And I think even if the reality is that the DNA has just been, you know, mistested in the past, that just the question mark that hangs over that opens up all these other interesting questions about gender abhorrentship, about women in the armed forces in the 19th century and what roles they did play. And I think it kind of, it opens that door to possibility and to us thinking more deeply about women's roles. You know, we've got Lady Franklin pulling a lot of strings from back in Britain in this story, but it is possible that there were women closer to the front line.

And that's one of the things that we want to continue to explore in After Dark is that kind of nuance between what is in the record, what we can interpret through kind of unconventional ways. So thank you, Maddy, so much for sharing that with me. I think it's really had some insight, but actually some of those details, the gloves particularly stick with me, some of those more kind of human elements that write the writing of the poetry, the writing of the letter to Franklin. Those are things that like I will remember rather than just the facts and the dates. I think that's kind of what makes history come alive. Absolutely. I think, you know, it's a case that invites us to think about how we construct historical narrative as well, that the traditional records that we would

maybe take from a ship and use that to reconstruct a voyage. They don't really exist. And so we have to look elsewhere. We have to look to the bodies. We have to look to even the one-sided correspondence coming from home. We have to look at these incredible objects that have been preserved. And unfortunately, some of the more grisly elements of the evidence that was recovered. But it gives us an incredible story and a story that has huge gaps in it and that really does provoke more questions than answers, I think. But it's absolutely fascinating. I hope you were listening to that wrapped up warmly, because I know I'm starting to shiver a little bit now talking about all this ice and cold and dark, but definitely

a fitting After Dark episode. And thank you, Maddy, for about all this ice and cold and dark, but definitely a fitting After Dark episode. And thank you, Maddy, for sharing all that information. You're very welcome. Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of After Dark. If you liked what you heard, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts and join us next time for another spooky, historical investigation into the darker side of history. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour.

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