Stuff You Should Know - The Mysterious Disappearance of the Franklin Expedition

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

One of the great Arctic mysteries was the disappearance of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition in search of a northwest passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. Not one man survived the trip, and they left precious little behind in the way of clues.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me. Hey, this is Annie in Samantha and we are the host of Stuff Mom Never Told You, a podcast about intersectional feminism and all the ways it impacts all of us. And now, we're coming out with a book that takes an even deeper look at some of the topics important to us. We dig into people-leading movements like civil rights and the Jane Collective, and we

discuss why fictional characters like Princess Leia and tropes like the final girl are powerful and so much more order your copy today of Stuff mom never told you with a feminist past present and future where books are sold or get yours at stuff You should read books.com Welcome to stuff you should know a production of I heart radio Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and Chuck is with me too. We're just a couple of intrepid explorers sitting around in tiny rooms. I don't know what we're exploring but we're exploring something. Brazing to death?

Yeah, I'm a little warm actually. I'm kind of sweaty. Maybe scurvy. I don't know. Nomonia. Lead poisoning? Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of bad things that happened about this expedition that we're going to talk about, the Franklin expedition. Very, very famous, I guess, polar. No, it wasn't a polar expedition, it was an Arctic expedition from the middle of the 19th century.

And if you've ever seen that show on AMC, the Terror, did you ever watch that? No, I wouldn't be recommending that a while ago though. It's so good, Chuck. So there's two seasons, two totally different stories. I'm recommending the first one, because it's all about like a speculative fiction about this. About this very thing?

You both believe it's not? No, just a second season is about a Japanese family in an internment camp during World War II. My sounds equally uplifting. Totally different. But the first season is really amazing. And it is all about this. All the characters in that season are based on

actual people from this expedition. It's really neat. Well, now it all hits home. Yeah, there you go. So even before AMC came along, you did it. This is probably one of the most famous expeditions in history, mainly because it was such a colossal catastrophe. There were 129 crew members, including the captain,

the expedition leader, all the officers, and all the crew. And not one survived. All of the crew was lost. That's really rare, even for Arctic exploration back in the day. And then on top of that, for a very long time, we had no real clue what happened to them. What we did, we just ignored the clues. But it was a mystery. They just vanished basically.

The last time they were seen was by a couple of wailing ships at the very beginning of their voyage and that was it. Yeah, I mean there's lots of ways to disappear. Especially in the Arctic. Yeah, in the Arctic. In that time of in the 19th century. Very easy to happen. Yeah, but at the same time this was remarkable even at the time. It was weird that these guys, this expedition just went so colossally bad. And then one of the reasons, like I was saying, that it's been such an enduring

mysteries, because we never really knew, we never had much evidence. And then we had scant evidence over time. And the little evidence that we did collect didn't really just explain everything. There are lots of question marks. And even today, with all the stuff we found and discovered along the way, we don't really know why this whole thing went so pear-shaped so quickly. Yeah, for sure.

But we're going to talk about whatever we do know. I think that's our task today. Are you prepared for this task? Sounds like a very not thought out name that our show could have been called. Are task is to explain this today? No, everything we do know, instead of stuff you should know. Oh, okay.

Should we talk about the Northwest passage? I would love to, because it's kind of important. Yeah, well, it's funny. It kind of isn't. It kind of isn't. I think that they thought it was going to be really, really, really important back in the day when they were like, hey, listen, we got to find a route to sail basically straight from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And as it turns out, it didn't end up being a big heavily used passage. There's a problem with the Northwest passage, and that is, it's really hard to get through.

There are a lot of Arctic islands up there, north of Canada, and there's a lot of ice. That ice moves around a lot. You can never exactly predict where you're gonna find that ice or where it's gonna recede and even when you're out there, it's gonna be moving around. So it's almost like playing a game of Frogger sometimes when you're to the, forget the car part like the highway. Like when you get to the river because you're like, oh, you know, I got a passage now because I see it in front of me, but I might not have it in an hour because the ice moves.

So it's a very tricky thing to get through. A lot of people and a lot of expeditions went, tried to get through it, charted, you know, great deals of it. And as we'll see in the end, John Franklin and his crew was tasked with basically about 300 miles of figuring it out, charting it, and that was the last bit. And even had it been all charted, it's still not like an easy thing to get through. No, but just charting it was a huge mission for the Royal Navy, because at the time, the middle of the 19th century,

the British Royal Navy was the greatest see power in the world. Sure. And in their backyard, the Arctic, there was an entire piece of the globe that was just a blank question mark. I saw a really great documentary on Nova. And they showed a map of the world as they understood it

in the mid 19th century. And everything else had been charted except for the spot in the middle of the Arctic. So it was kind of a mark there. They actually did. They had a blank space and a question. More amazing. It was like the Riddler had done the photography.

But it was like a blemish on the reputation of the British Navy that they still hadn't been able to chart it despite trying for hundreds of years To at the very least chart it if not make it through so it was a big deal and that's they they really wanted to do this Yeah, and like I said a lot of people you can't like point to a single person and say like they discovered this passage and say like they discovered this passage. Kind of for some of the reasons we've been talking about the 30,000 islands in the ice and people getting bits and pieces together a little bit at a time.

But a lot of people take credit, there are a lot of people that are given credit for different parts of it. There was one guy named Robert McClure from the Royal Navy, of course. And he's credited as the first complete transit. Part of that was on land. And then there's a guy, a Norwegian named Rob Amensen, who was like, all right, now this is the first guy who did it all by C. And this was like, what 50 plus years after McClure had done it

partially on land. So it's like a lot of time is passing and this is at a time when the advances of sailing and getting through passages like this was sort of at its peak. Yes, and by the way, Rold Aminson, he was also the guy who was the first to make it to the South Pole. So he was quite a show off as far as explorers go. Look at him. So yeah, it wasn't until the 20th century that somebody actually made it all the way through by ship. So it kind of goes to show you that like, they weren't really successful, this Franklin expedition and even after the expedition.

But what's interesting about it is Ed helped us out with this and he made a point that there were a lot of rescue missions to go find the lost Franklin expedition. While they were there, they charted stuff that had been uncharted. Ed makes the point that by getting lost, Franklin actually contributed more to the charting of his unknown part of the Arctic than he did while he was actually alive, because he didn't actually make it very far and his crew made it kind of far.

By the time they made it to where they were going, they couldn't have cared less about charting. They were just trying to stay alive, unsuccessfully, as we'll see. Yeah, well, there you have it. Oh, I guess I spoiled it. I guess I spoiled it. After having already said that,

not one of the hundred and thousand shine men survived. Yeah, you're like, no wait, I spoiled it in the first 30 seconds, not just now. Exactly. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about Franklin. John Franklin, that is not Benjamin, of course. Sure. He hated boats.

John Franklin was born in 1786, and he was not a rich guy. He did not come from some noble family. But he did end up getting a lot of seafaring experience in the Navy, a lot of combat experience. Like he knew his way around a ship. So in 1819, he saw that the British Navy was downsizing some and the writing was kind of on the wall for at least he felt the writing was on the wall for him. And he said, all right, what I should do if I want to, you know, continue at sea in it, you know, kind of like this life is I got

to get out of the military and become an explorer, become an art to explore because that was like a path post-military that you could do. You could become an adventurer. Yeah, and he was still part of the British Royal Navy. He was a captain in it, but it wasn't engaging in warfare, he was engaging in exploration. So it was almost like they had two prongs, you could either go like discovery core or the core of death and destruction. Sounds like both lead to death. Yeah, in this case, discovery, cordon, pan out there.

That just spoil it again. So, yeah, we'll just everybody just forget that everyone dies. We're working up to that apparently. So he got to work on his discovery path. He was doing pretty well. He commanded some expeditions here and there. One ended up being a big failure on the North Coast of Canada exploring near the Copper Mine River. Half of the men died. The reason that this is noteworthy is because that even though it was a big failure, he gained a lot of notoriety because he survived grim conditions and very famously ate his boots to survive, ate the leather from his boots, which is a thing that happened on a loan on that TV show I watched that some guy ate part of his belt. Oh yeah, how did it go down? It didn't go down well. I can't imagine it would, man.

I don't think I think the idea when you boil leather like that is that it's just, you know, some of the fat will come off and it's it might give you a little bit of caloric intake, but it's not a great plan for a success long term. But Franklin earned a lot of notoriety by eating his boots and wrote a big best-selling book about it and was knighted, even though it was a failure. Yeah, because they kind of saw it as, you know,

he had sacrificed that much in the name of exploration. Yeah, because they kind of saw it as, you know, he had sacrificed that much in the name of exploration. So why not night him? You know, it's better than like throwing Ron Tomatoes at him upon his return. The guy had to eat his boots for Pete's sake, you know? Yeah, exactly. So that was one of his two initial expeditions.

The one that we're talking about today was his third. The other one was pretty catastrophic too. Nothing like the first one and nothing like the third one, but still noteworthy enough that it was not successful. They got lost and both of those first expeditions, Franklin and his crew were bailed out by Inuit, who basically made sure that they stayed alive. He probably wouldn't have survived that first expedition, had it not been helped from the Inuit who made sure that they made it back and were fed and all that stuff.

And that's a big recurring theme that we're gonna run into is the Inuit were in the background, like back in England, people knew they were there, they called them Eskimo, spelled like it would if you were in New Orleans or something with the AUX at the end. Oh, really? Yeah, that's what they did. They were not thought very highly of.

And yet the whole time, as we'll see like the Inuit were just witnesses to this history, had an extensive and detailed oral history. New exactly what happened where everybody was and what went down when, and yet the British and other European explorers just would not listen to them. And when they did listen to them and they tried to explain it to England, England shouted that person down and told them they were a fool for listening

to the chattering of these Eskimo. So that's just kind of a common theme as we'll see that the Inuit played a huge outside role that we're only now starting to kind of a common theme as we'll see that the Inuit played a huge outsize role that we're only now starting to kind of like acknowledge or recognize. Yeah, they also, there was a common theme that if you were smart enough to listen to them while you were there, they'd be faired much better than if you did things your own way. Definitely, but the problem was is like that was not something you would want to do back in the mid-19th century in front of your crew.

You could very quickly, like, your crew could lose confidence in you because you were doing something totally out of the norm and probably out of the bounds of respectable behavior by following the lead of, you know, an Inuit at the time, or I'm sorry, an Inook. Something I learned is Inuit is the plural. Inook is the singular. So if you're talking to you wouldn't say I'm talking to Americans, say I'm talking to an American and in the same way, say I'm talking to an Inook who's a member of the Inuit. Yeah, what they were smart to do would be to take an Inook around behind a big block of ice and very quietly say, listen, oh boy, if you have any advice. Please just let me know quietly. Copy the follow. Can you draw where we should go in the snow? Right. And then yes, yeah.

And then erase it very quickly. With P, say face, yeah, with your urine. So, or no, no, no, wait, erase it with urine or spell it out in urine. You would erase it with urine. You could do both, but the spelling it out with urine would be too permanent. You would want to pee all over it, and it would melt out the instructions once you committed them to memory. And everybody in your crew would have thought

you just went behind the ice block to pee. Well, that's why they have the slogan as the sharpie of snow riding. What does pee? Yeah. Okay, it's perfect. I didn't know that. I didn't know pee? Yeah. Okay. I didn't know that. I didn't know pee had its own slogan.

It did. I really, a circumnavigated that like a big ice flow. That was nice. Clumsily somewhat breaking through with my iron force. There were a couple of bumps in there, sure. All right. So where are we? He has, he had the second expedition that he said wasn't as bad as the first and third

Still not great, right? He's kind of thinking about hanging up his half-eaten boiled boots at this point. He's in his fifties and in 1837 They said now why don't you take this appointment as the lieutenant governor of Endemons land Which we now know as Tasmania. And that only lasted a few years. And as wife Jane said, you know, what you should really do is finish strong. You're getting old. You got one more in you,

just to sort of save the family name. One more Arctic expedition that might really be great and cement you as a victor. And he said, I guess I'll try, if they'll have me. He said Roger, Roger. that might really be great and cement you as a victor. And he said, I guess I'll try, if they'll have me. He said Roger, Roger. Yeah. So he did, well she did, I should say. He kind of just went along with it,

but Lady Jane Franklin really worked behind the scenes to get her husband appointed to the head of an Arctic expedition. And in particular, this one that was considered potentially the last one to map the Northwest passage ahead of an Arctic expedition. And in particular, this one that was considered potentially the last one to map the Northwest passage, because there was only that 300 miles of uncharted territory.

So I got a question though. Was this a situation where they gave it to this older guy because no one wanted to do it? Because it was so dangerous. Or like I saw that the younger captains declined to take the position. Is it because it was so dangerous or like I saw that the you know younger captains, you know, declined to take the position. Is it because it was just so fraught? I don't know. I honestly don't know.

It's possible, but that seems like that would fly in the face of like the Royal Navy and their attitude at the time. Like you would step up and be like, yes, I'll be the one to die rather than be like, I don't want that, you know. So, I don't want that. So I'm not sure exactly why. I'll have to go back and watch the terror again. Is it like how historically accurate is it? Extremely, but at the same time, it also veers off

into like just wild speculation. Oh, okay. I gotta see it now. Yeah, I can't really get across how good it is. And it's one of those ones where, you know, when somebody talks something up and you go and expecting high hopes or high hopes, and you're invariably let down,

you will not be let down. All right. That's how great it is. I expect text from you every like a couple hours while you're watching it. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, let's take a break.

We've got it set up in that he is going to take this final voyage to restore his name and we'll be back right after this to let you know what happened. Okay, so Lady Jane Franklin has successfully secured the appointment as head of this expedition in 1846, I believe, in 1846 expedition to the Arctic to untruth territory, largely because no one else would accept it, but also because she maneuvered. I don't think, I think without her wrangling, he still might not have gotten it, even though no one else wanted it. He was ready to go out to pasture, and the Royal Navy was more than willing to let him go. Lady James Franklin said, no, meet my sheer will. And they did. And so he became

head. And it's not like he was just some hapless boob or something like that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Great, and there were plenty of other captains in the Royal Navy that had far better track records than him. But again, I don't want to get across like, he was the wrong man for the job. He just wasn't necessarily the best man for the job. Yeah, exactly. I was trying to make up a funny name for the worst captain in the Royal Navy, but... I can't stop.

I got nothing either. Yeah, no matter how I try. I guarantee it won't be good. Like, oh, what's something funny about someone who can't sail? They have lead feet. How about lead foot, Mick can't swim. Oh, boy. That is a worst. That's not a good sailor right there.

Or James Francis can't steer. Right. I love it. Should we speaking of steering, should we talk about these boats? Yeah, let's because they're kind of important too. Yeah, very important. One, as I guess is named for the TV show, the terror. Or vice versa. Yeah. And the Arabis, what Hoseko was named after the TV show. And the Arabis, these were previous to this outing. They were, they were warships, but they were ships that didn't, you know, have like cannons up and down the sides. They were delivering big mortar rounds close to shore.

So they were, they were squatty and they were super strong and they were sailing ships, but they were retrofitted for this adventure. I keep calling it adventure. It wasn't an adventure. I think it's fair. Yeah. For a while at least. They were retrofitted in a bunch of ways. First of all, adding these iron plates to the front to, you know, break through the ice. But then they also added a steam engine to the sailing vessel, not to just use full time, but, you know, because you require too much coal. You can't do But then they also added a steam engine to the sailing vessel, not to just use full time, but you know, because you require too much coal,

you can't do something like that. But to get you through like, like I was talking about that moving ice, if they were like, oh my gosh, we need to get over there quick, because I see a channel that's closing, they could kick in that steam and get over there faster. Let's just like one ways that they would use the steam engine.

Yeah, like if you were playing Frogger, you wanted your steam engines going. Exactly. So they also figured out how to use the steam as basically central heating. This was like state of the art. We're talking like the late 1840s here. And these guys were going on an Arctic expedition. And I think they may have been the first crew ever to sail into the Arctic with Central heat. So there was an enormous luxury, and they also used the steam system as a water distillation system. So they had all the fresh water they needed, but they could desalinate it, they could decontaminate it. It was just a really ingenious system, all kind of built into one. Yeah, and if you're wondering about the propellers,

being a problem with the ice, they actually retracted back into the hole when they were in shallow water and icy water. So like for the 1840s, this felt like a very modern operation. Oh yeah, for sure. So the, it's important to remember though, that the steam was meant to just kind of give them a boost.

They were still sailing ships. Yes. Mostly how they moved was through sail. Yeah. And they brought a lot of stuff. We always like to talk about the load of any expedition and what they kind of carried because it's usually a pre-cursor too.

They didn't either have enough or they had the wrong stuff. They had 32,000 pounds of beef, 33,000 pounds of tin to meat, which very much come into play, we'll get to that later. They had fresh veggies, they had livestock, they had live animals on board, right? They had cattle sheep, pigs, hens, all meant to probably not last very long. And then...

So the heating was good at first. Exactly. They also had pets too, Chuck. There were three pets. There was a monkey that Lady Jane Franklin gave to the ship as a present, and I guess was kind of kept in Franklin's pet. Yeah. And apparently used to steal stuff a lot, but it was a super cute monkey, so everybody forgave them every time.

Much more popular was a dog named Neptune and Newfoundland. I mean, come on. I got to have a dog on board. And then there was a cat that may or may not have had a name because I think I got this information from a historian named John Geiger who was basically dedicated as a career to the Franklin expedition, and he does not name this cat. And the fact that he didn't make me think that cat didn't have a name. It was just the cat.

I don't think they named cats for a while. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen a lot of historical stories with those like a cat they just called cat. So like Mr. Sphinx didn't come around until like the 70s maybe? I don't know. We'll find out.

What's the short stuff just waiting to happen? Totally. They also had thousands of pounds of sugar, had tons of spices. I mentioned the veggies. They had, you gotta have tobacco. They had about 7,000 plus pounds of tobacco. Tons of booze, 4,000 gallons of either rum or wine,

close to 3,000 pounds of candles, so they could see, because you know, it gets during the winter there, it's dark for long, long periods of time. For sure. Lemon juice, lots of lemon juice. That's a big one. They had 930 gallons of lemon juice to stave off scurvy

and every crew member got announced a day. And unfortunately, it didn't work for a lot of people. A lot of guys seem to have gotten scurvy, their teeth fell out, and they were fatigued, and all sorts of terrible things happened because of a vitamin C deficiency. And yet they had enough lemon. And apparently historians think that the lemon juice may have started to ferment.

And so to kill off that bacteria, they may have boiled the lemon juice to get kind of recharged it. And in doing so, that would render the ascorbic acid, the vitamin C totally ineffective, in or basically. And so they could have been drinking lemon juice all day long and they still would have gotten scurvy. So that's a great theory. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's the best one I've heard. It's also the only one I've heard, but it's still seen pretty good.

And how about we set up the first part of this 10-food thing, and then we'll reveal what happened later. Yeah. But he, you know, it was sort of a new thing. Usually you would take dry goods, like salted pork and stuff like that if you wanted to eat well on a ship. But Franklin said, no, let's do this a little better. Tinting technology is new. I'm going to contract with this guy. He's named Stephen Goldner, and he's, well, I was about to say the best at this, but he

was doing this. And they said, give us whatever you can get us on time. We need 8,000 tens of food Cooked beef cook pork preserve meat all soup even don't forget the Pemakin. Oh well, what is Pemakin? I've heard of that It's it's I saw it described as paste of dried and pounded meat I saw it described as paste of dried and pounded meat mixed with fat and spices. I saw it compared to oily beef jerky. And then some people like, I guess, keto people, like, will it add like maybe some fruit or something to it just for a little bit of carbs. Okay.

But it was a very popular staple in the Arctic because it was fatty and full of protein. And that's why you needed better things. Those are good things. Yeah, for sure. And Goldner was like, all right, this stuff is going to be great. It'll last you a few years. And I need to get to work, though, because I have a short timeline. But delivered those tens, and that's where we're going to leave it for now.

Yeah. So they took on all these supplies. I think after they passed Scotland in Disco Bay, DISKO. Yeah. It's shame. Yeah. They do not dance in Disco Bay. No. That's in Greenland on the west coast of Greenland. That's where they took on supplies. And then also, really interestingly, they left behind five guys. There were originally 134 crew members, but five of them were left behind in Greenland because they were basically booted off the ship by Franklin.

The only explanation I saw is that they had run a foul of his bands on swearing and drunkenness. So they actually managed to avoid this grim fate by cursing and being drunk essentially. For sure. So they took on all of these supplies, they took on the coal, they took on all the tin meat and all that. And they started sailing toward Baffin Bay, not the one in Texas, this one is up in the

Arctic. And they were about to enterlankaster sound or they did. Right before they did, they were cited by a couple of wailing ships, the enterprise and the Prince of Wales. And it's really disappointing they didn't spell the Prince of Wales like a wail, they spelled it like the country. It's a wailing ship. Come on. Yeah. I mean, both names are supposed to be buns for sure like Oh, man, I can't think of one right now I can't either all of them are though aren't they yeah At least I was in Florida and you know California like San Diego. Yeah, they're very funny usually

Okay, so these whaling ships hung out with them apparently they boarded and like looked around They were like, oh my god central heat when they took their leave of the Arabis and the terror, they were the last Europeans to see these people alive. That's right. And one of the other things I just want to say about Lancaster Sound Chuck from Baffin Bay. If you look at it on a map and they don't map out the sea ice, it is a, you could shoot an arrow

from Baffin Bay to the Arctic Ocean, which would eventually take you to the Pacific, just straight through Lancaster Sound. And yet because of the ice, it was so bad, they couldn't go anywhere near across Lancaster Sound. They had to immediately start to go south. Yeah. Oh boy. Go south indeed.

Uh, I guess we should talk a little bit about how you navigate through this ice. We did mention that it had iron on the front of their ships and any ice ship, proficiency ship that's in icy waters, will have a reinforced hull because you can break through some of this stuff. If you ever watch Deadliest Catch, they do that kind of thing here and there. But if you really get sort of in a position where you, you know, the ice is too thick, and you know, this ice is continually being just smashed against the shore until you have like ice mountains along the shoreline. And it just stacks up on each other.

So eventually if you get to a place where you really can't get through, there are a couple of things you can do. You can wait for summer and cross your fingers that it'll melt, because it may not even melt then. Or you can use a process called warping, which is when you basically inch yourself along little by little by, if there's land nearby, you could tie yourself to something strong on land and winch yourself by little by little.

If there's no land around, you can put your anchor in a dinghy and send somebody out, probably not a dinghy, a little bit bigger boat. Drop the anchor and then winch yourself toward that anchor, but it is extremely slow going if you can even get through at that point. I think Ed used one example of a rescue expedition that was trying to find Franklin but it is extremely slow going if you can even get through at that point. I think Ed used one example of a rescue expedition that was trying to find Franklin that spent nine hours basically going

the length of their ship like an inch at a time. So it's not fun, it is, but it's like that maybe your only chance it's survival sometimes because you could get stuck in ice forever and die. For sure. And that's actually what the Franklin expedition found themselves in that situation. At first, they were doing fine. They wintered at Beechey Island, which is not very far past where they entered from Baffin Bay, because I think they set sail on May 19th.

And winter comes quickly. Right, exactly. They finally, oh, sorry, they finally left Disco Bay in July of 1845. So yeah, winter comes way earlier up there than it does here. So they went pretty quickly. And they were successful that first winner, the I started to melt and they started to do some cool little navigating and apparently doing U-turns and all sorts of stuff that we'll never probably know exactly what they did. But that first winner in summer went fine. Yeah, but three guys did die of basically kind of how you die back then in those conditions.

Could have been pneumonia. It could have been, I mean, he knows what kind of health some of these guys were in, but there wasn't anything like super unusual. They just lost three guys. Yes, but that supposedly was not a good record, even for an Arctic expedition, losing three guys that quickly. Yeah. So aside from the three deaths fine, things went pretty well. Compared to the rest of the expedition, that was great, right? Sure.

So the first winter comes and goes, the first summer comes and goes, and now they've made it to the Northwest corner of King William Island, and they get iced in for the winter. And again, this is what they're expecting. They had three years worth of supplies. They figured it would take that long to circumnavigate

all of this ice flow throughout these seasons. So they're not worried yet. When they start to worry is when the next summer comes and the ice doesn't melt. Right. And that's what I mentioned earlier by crossing your fingers. Sometimes it melts, sometimes it doesn't. It all depends on the conditions at the time.

At this point, they had been there for a while. Like you said, we're surviving. And they were even sending guys a shore that were charting their location. And nothing was really out of the ordinary, like you said, until they were like, well, we're still stuck. And that's when it got fairly scary. This is, I guess, spring or what would be spring. I don't even know what you would call May in that area in 1847.

Winter Part II, maybe? Sure. There was a team that went to leave uh... and this method for leaving messages they would use these royal navy forms basically like uh... they should have just had letterhead because they would have more room to write but instead they would write in the margins

of these royal navy forms just to make sure people knew it was them and they would leave them in sealed canisters uh... in various places. This one was under a can that someone else had built before them. It was a pretty brief note. Things were okay. Nothing out of the ordinary to report at that time. These people came back to the ship from delivering this note and making sure it was safe to be found later. And Franklin had died while they were gone on June 11th. Yeah, they even said in the note, Franklin commanding.

Yeah, and then all well. And they should have said as far as we know. Right. So that's, I mean, that's kind of a big deal. I mean, the leader of the expedition dies. Oh, yeah. It's not like, well, what do we do now? I mean, there was a second in command, I got to name Francis Crosier, and then a third

in command named James Fitzcham. So there was like a clear chain of command of able captains and leaders, right? Sure. But it's still, I mean, at the very least, that just seems like bad juju when you're up on an Arctic expedition and you've been snowed in through summer, right? Yeah. And a few other people died too. So at this point, they've lost, you know, probably close to 10 people. So from September 1846, when they first got iced in for the second time, this time off the Northwest coast of King William Island, all the way through 1848 and actually beyond,

they just sat there. Their ships were iced in. They didn't move. They just stayed there. If the ice moved, then the ships moved, but that was it. They didn't move within the ice. And these guys were like living on these ships, kind of living on shore. They made camps. And then they finally abandoned the ships, because it was becoming clear that I guess, Crozier had this gamble to make. He could either wait to see if the ice melted next summer, in which case they could probably make it through to safety. They could sail to safety during the summer and be saved.

But if the ice didn't melt, he would have wasted several months waiting for to see if the ice melted. When they could have been walking to safety. And he chose option B. He said, we need to start moving towards safety because I don't think that this ice is gonna melt again. Yeah.

And the inuit, the, who listened to them, if you doesn't of them did make it to mainland Canada, but just because you made it to mainland Canada, it doesn't mean like that you're saved. Like they, they were still in big trouble. Oh, yeah. Obviously. At this point, Lady Jane, well, should we take a break now, actually? Yeah, let's take a break. All right, we'll take a break and talk about what Lady Jane did ready for this. Alright, so at this point things are going really bad.

The expedition itself as far as trying to get these last 300 miles that that passage figured out was, I mean, forget about that at this point. These guys are just trying to be alive. They're walking across frozen sea ice that they're just walking. It's that much ice that it's just like one continuous sheet all the way to Canada. Not a healthy prospect for survival. No, and one other thing, Chuck, I want to throw in, they're not just walking. They're pushing huge ships

loaded with supplies, they're dragging them and pushing them along this ice and rock. Okay? Not a fun task. Not exactly. So this is where the search period begins, which spanned from 1847 to 1859. All kinds of people went out looking,

Lady Jane was ringing that bell. The Royal Navy was offering up 20,000 pounds in 1850 ton of money. Do you want to know? I mean, let's hear it. Is this an American or a... I got both, buddy. Well, let's hear it. That would be 2.2 million pounds today or 2.8 million dollars today. What about yours? Oh, I didn't do that one. You got me.

Interesting. You could have said, what about Drock months? Typically more thorough, but that's fine. Sorry. No, that's it. Man, that's a lot of money. Enough to attract what eventually ended up being over 30 expeditions that were going to be fraught with the same peril. You know, I mean, it's not like things had changed and it was now easy, but it was, you

know, it was sort of like in jaws, you know, all these, all these people had money on their mind, they had their mind on their money and the money on their minds, right? And wanted all those pounds. And it was a big, it was a big public thing. Like people wanted them back and they tried to get them back their hardest. Yeah, because, you know, one of the reasons why John Franklin was known was

because he was the man who ate his boot. Good to get that guy. The English public, right. And the English public was also very much fascinated with Arctic exploration. It would be kind of analogous to the American public being interested in going to the moon in the 60s. Yeah.

Kind of like that. Yeah, not like now, no one cares. Sadly, hopefully everybody will get re-interested again when we start going to the moon again soon. One of the big names in the one of these search parties was a guy named John Ray. He was he was a guy that sort of well we'll get to kind of his big reveal in a second here but he was very noteworthy and proficient guy. He knew what he was doing. He had been all over the Arctic. I think he was one of the guys who listened to the enumet, right? He was and he was doing, he had been all over the Arctic, I think he was one of the guys who listened to the Inuit, right? He was, and he got shouted down as a result because he came back from this exploration

and interviewing a number of Inuit and he said, hey, they told me that these guys probably, not probably, but definitely engaged in cannibalism. That's how desperate they became. And they didn't want to hear they became. And that did not- They didn't wanna hear that. No, that did not sit well with Lady Jane Franklin. And she actually got Charles Dickens to basically write this diatribe

about how terrible a person Ray was for listening to the Inuit and how Terrible Dickens. Yeah, how terrible the Inuit were. John Geiger says that it was just a stain on his reputation that continues today. It was very racist, the stuff that he wrote, and he did it on behalf of Lady Jane Franklin to basically say like you're slandering these heroes. And Dickens even said if they're dead, I'll bet it was the in you that did this. Anything but the possibility that they actually

became so desperate to engage in cannibalism. And as we'll see, it turns out that the in you who said that this happened were actually proven correct like a century later. Yeah, exactly. By the 1900s, they had found graves, they had found corpses, they had found a lot of the stuff except for the ships and remarkably just, oh, how long? Like not even 10 years ago in 2014 and in 2016, they found the Arabus and the terror respectively in about 30 feet of water, fairly intact considering how long it had been. This was, I think, terror was off of King William Island. Airbus was a little further south,

near the Adelaide Peninsula. And they don't just don't know for sure how the Airbus exactly got there, whether it was sail there or move there, or just accidentally drifted there. Some combination of all those, who knows? Yeah, it's possible it drifted like after the ice melted. Some people say maybe the ice moved it all the way down there

that that wouldn't have happened to what had crushed the boat. It could have very easily been sailed, but either way, like finding those ships was enormous and there's really cool parks, Canada videos of scuba divers swimming through these ships that are like almost entirely intact. There's still dishes on the shelves and bottles on shelves and desks intact and the drawers are closed, they think because of the state of the water and the anaerobic conditions

that there's probably lots of documentation of what went on during the expedition in those drawers that they're going to eventually be able to get to. Totally. As far as why they perished, there are a bunch of theories. Sort of, you know, three of them can be kind of lumped together and it could happen to sort of any expedition, which is. You know, bad luck with the weather. You know, those two really bad winners in a row without that summer thought that they maybe were counting on combined with not being as prepared as you should have been

I guess two not three even though they were prepared they were heavily stocked this is just really rough territory and the clothes they had might not have been perfect. They really held water well, which would freeze. The equipment was really heavy. Like we said, they weren't listening to the locals about how you should really do things. They were doing things their way. So that's a kind of under-preparedness. And so those are just sort of under the normal ways that one could die on an expedition like this then. And with the bad luck in particular, where they got iced in for that second winner, even the Inuit are like, we don't really go around there. They called it, to new knee, which is back of beyond, which is a terrible name for a place

that you're iced in in the Arctic. And then on that note, the documentary, they took ice core samples and they found that those winters that they were iced in were two of the worst winters in 700 years in that area. That's called that look. They had terribly bad luck for sure. Yeah, slash underprepared because they shouldn't have been there to begin with. Right.

So those are all sort of normal ways that you could perish. Like I said, the last one that we have to talk about, though, is this lead poisoning. We talked about the contract with the guy that was innovating with his 10 meats. He had had rushed this thing through. It apparently leaked lead and, you know, it was lined with lead and that leaked into the food. They did lots of studies over the years. The first I believe was 1981. There was an anthropologist named Owen, Dr. Owen Bede, and basically it was the first person to say, you know, I think this,

we've literally are founding lead in their bones, like at levels that we should not see. And it seems pretty obvious there was lead in the examine corpses. It may not have been everything, but it definitely had something to do with a lot of the deaths. Yeah, it's kind of criticized that he didn't have a control group like it's possible these guys had tons of lead

in their bodies anyway, just from life-long exposure to lead and that it's possible their bones released it as they started to die basically. Right. We don't know because there isn't a control group, but it is quite possible that it had some effect on the expedition if it wasn't directly killing people. They also think that they contaminated tins or that the poorly soldered tins may have been contaminated with botulism, which would have killed off a lot of people, too.

And then, yeah, so it's just not clear. Like those first three graves that they found from the first winner, like you said, they were, I think they died from pneumonia from tuberculosis. But so few people have been found and the state that they've been found in hasn't really allowed for forensic anthropology to say, this is how this guy died. This is how this guy died. So it's all left to the imagination. And I think one of the things that captures my imagination the most is that there are inuit reports that in the summer of either 1851 or 1852,

there were still four survivors left from this crew. Four of them in a dog, probably Neptune the newfoundland I imagine, and that they were the most skilled at hunting so they had survived the longest and they were all that was left and by 1851 1852 there had already been numerous search expeditions launched So that means that there were people searching for them while there were still survivors So that means that there were people searching for them while there were still survivors. They just didn't, their paths didn't cross. They just didn't find one another. And those guys were, those last four were the last of them.

And I guess they did not go on. Yeah. I guess we should talk a little bit about the cannibalism thing because that's, you know, that was what Ray was sort of brave enough to talk about and was, you like you said he was he was basically uh... shunned because of this they didn't want to hear anything like that and it turns out that he was he was based he was right i mean there's no other way to say it they found cut marks on bones on leg bones uh... they found a skull from the same person that was intentionally broken. All these like, now that we know what cannibal sights look like, it has all the markings basically.

Literally. Yeah, like intentionally breaking bones, cutting bones on purpose. What else? They found like clusters, clusters of bones together. Like they'd just been tossed. That weren't like just part of the body dying, like bones that shouldn't be together were together. Yeah, and then a lot of the bones that were found were like long bones. So they suspect that they had just been like carrying arms and legs as as portable food. It was a bad jam. So there is it is clear that they did engage in cannibalism and not only was Ray Wright, they knew it who told Ray that they had engaged in cannibalism were right.

And throughout some of these expeditions that came during what's called the Franklin search period from 1857 to 59, a lot of Inuit agreed to be interviewed with translators with some of these explorers, and they documented these interviews. And it wasn't until like a century later that historians like John Geiger went through this stuff and was like, oh, the Inuit knew all along exactly what had happened. Apparently one of them pointed to where the ship was, I think the Arabis, and they still didn't discover it for another century after that. So it's a really interesting, just kind of side note that like this whole group of people were willing to cooperate and share

their knowledge, and they were just totally ignored, and that's what led to the mystery that lasted for over a century. Yeah, I mean, I think if it hadn't been for him poking around more, they were quite happy just to leave this as it was, and that sort of be the end of it all. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. Good stuff. Yeah, so that's the Franklin Expedition,

and now that we've found the ships, yeah, they are pretty confident that we'll have a lot more information soon, so that'll be pretty cool to look out for. And since I said it's cool to look out for, oh by the way if you want to know more about this, go check out that Nova episode on it. It's really really good. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this the shortest short stuff because this is from Kent and Kent talks he's basically sending in a short stuff suggestion but I think it says enough about the thing that it can just be its own little episode here at the end. Oh, and we were talking about the 70s trucker craze on the trucker episode, Long Hall Trucking

and he said we all know truckers have their own lingo, but one phrase that has died out in usage is the Monfort Lane. You heard of this? I had it until I wrote his email. Yeah, the Monfort Lane referred to the left lane of the interstate. In the early 70s, a Colorado catalegion named Kenny Monfort started shipping meat to the East Coast. He had a fleet of supposedly triple

digit trucks and drivers who were not afraid to mash it. They turned two trips a week from Colorado to New York City. One driver recalled he had $1,200 in speeding fines one year when these were back when tickets were about 15 bucks and points didn't accumulate license. That's important. Yeah, you just rack them up forever and have the company pay for them, I guess. And interestingly, the Monfort family is now the principal owners of the Colorado Rocky Space Ball team. That is very interesting. And that is from Kent. Thanks a lot, Kent. Good stuff all around. That was a short stuff right there on the end of the Franklin Expedition episode. Great.

If you were on to be like, what was it, Kent? Kent. If you're going to be like, Kent, and give us a little short stuff that we can add on as a list of your mail, I think that's a cool new thing. Let's give it a shot. And you can send that to stuffpodcast. at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. What's up, this ICT with something I know you're gonna want to hear it. In my new podcast, iced tea's daily game, I'll be dropping some daily wisdom and personal

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