Charles Dickens and the John Franklin Expedition
For this guest post, I am delighted to welcome my friend and colleague, Neil Bettridge. Neil was Project Archivist at the Derbyshire Record Office until recently. Whilst in that post, he catalogued many items connected to Franklin, his first wife, Eleanor Anne Porden, and their daughter, Eleanor Isabella, who married into the Derbyshire based Gell family.
Neil has also written a two-part series on the life of Eric Liddell, of Chariots of Fire fame. You can read those here and here.
Before beginning this post, I must start with a warning that it does include brief mention of cannibalism.
Sir John Franklin and 128 men under his command had set off in 1845 on the fateful Arctic expedition to find the North West Passage. It was provisioned to last for 3 years, and there was no real concern when nothing was heard about them in that time. Ships had been trapped in the ice over arctic winters before and returned home safely, and Franklin’s ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were regarded at the time as being the vessels most equipped ever to withstand the rigours of Arctic exploration.
By the start of 1848, the formidable Lady Jane Franklin had begun to fear for the fate of her husband and his men and initiated a remarkably successful publicity campaign to send out search expeditions to look for them. Her campaign even went international, as her attempts to lobby the American president, Zachary Taylor, aroused great interest in the Americans and the press attracted considerable financial support. No less than 19 expeditions set to find Franklin in the four years between 1848 and 1852, including one funded by an American industrialist and three financed by Lady Franklin herself, partially helped by what could be considered the Victorian version of crowd funding. None of these expeditions, however, were able to provide much conclusive evidence of what might have happened to the ships or the crews. By March 1854, the Admiralty had come to the reluctant conclusion that Franklin and his men were now all dead.
It would only be a few months, however, before the information vacuum would be filled by news from the Scottish explorer Dr John Rae, who returned to Britain after his Arctic land expedition. A surgeon and fur-trader, Rae had spent several years working for the Hudson Bay Company and learned many important lessons on how to survive successfully in the Arctic from the native Inuit peoples (formerly called Eskimos). He particularly used their methods of living and travelling. In May 1854, he had met several Inuits who reported that four years earlier that they had passed a group of 40 white men pulling a sledge southwards overland and that on their return the year after they had found nearby 35 corpses and signs of cannibalism. By trading with the Inuit, Rae came into possession of several items which were clearly relics of Franklin’s expedition. With this evidence, he decided to return home and landed back in England in October 1854.
Rae made two reports of his findings to the Admiralty, one of which made no mention of cannibalism and was intended for public circulation. Unfortunately, it was the other report which found its way into the newspapers, starting with “The Times” on 23 October. Given the high profile which the Franklin search expeditions had received, news of Rae’s findings created a sensation. The implication that men of the British Royal Navy has resorted to such extremes in their desperation was something that most people could hardly contemplate. One person who could certainly not contemplate it was Lady Jane Franklin. Although she had been heart-broken to receive the news, particularly when shown the relics recovered by Rae, which included personal items of her husband, she soon sprang into characteristic action to uphold the good name of her husband and that of the men under his command.
One important step she took was to call upon the services of the most famous social influencer of the time, the writer Charles Dickens. Through a mutual acquaintance, she extended an invitation to him to call on her, which he accepted. The outcome of this meeting was that an article entitled “The Lost Arctic Voyagers” appeared on 2 December 1854 in the weekly magazine “Household Words”, which was a publication edited by Dickens between 1850 and 1859. While accepting that Sir John Franklin and his men were almost certainly dead, and scrupulously avoiding any criticism of John Rae, the author roundly refuted any suggestion that the men of the expedition had resorted to eating each other.
First, Dickens concentrated on the second hand nature of what was reported, the potential mistranslation of the Inuits’ statements by interpreters and the questionable reliability of their testimony, which he called “the vague babble of savages”, even going on to suggest that any case of cannibalism may have been committed by the Inuit themselves. He also focused on Franklin’s 1st Arctic land expedition (1819-1822), when half of its number lost their lives, but the men of the Royal Navy had not resorted to cannibalism in similar circumstances. In the next issue of “Household Words”, he concentrated on providing his version of historical context by citing several examples where cannibalism could have taken place, but making distinction between the behaviour of Englishmen (who did not feed on other people) and foreigners or “inferior” people (who did).
In the next issue Dickens allowed John Rae to respond to the articles. He bravely put forward a defence of the veracity of what he had heard, based on his experience of the Inuit people over a number of years. He defended the quality of the translation of his interpreter and his reliability. He claimed that he and his own men had never been harmed by the Inuit, when there were several opportunities for them to have done so. He denied that the Inuit were lying savages, citing examples where what had been dismissed as lies had actually turned out to be correct. Cannibalism was a curse to them just as much as to other societies, and it was only in the most extreme circumstances that they resorted to it. Dickens responded to this in a fourth by going back to Franklin’s second Arctic land expedition (1825-1828), when Inuits had tried to steal the expedition’s goods and kill its men. No further articles on the subject appeared in “Household Words” after that.
Dickens had something of a morbid fascination with arctic exploration and would go on to tackle the subject again in 1856 by writing a play with his fellow author Wilkie Collins called “The Frozen Deep”, a melodrama in which explorers of an Arctic expedition faced the same sorts of dilemmas. Although Dickens took one of the major acting parts and it was initially well received, it never became established as a repertory piece. In 1859, other explorers found the Victory Point note, which proved that Sir John Franklin had died in 1847 and that those who outlived him in 1848 had decided to abandon the ships in the ice and to trek their way to safety.
Doctor Rae never received the recognition of other Arctic explorers in the form of a knighthood, which he would have deserved, and his reputation has only been really restored in the last few years. Inuit testimony has found to be correct in many instances, including on the occasions when the wrecks of the ships were discovered in 2014 (HMS Erebus) and 2016 (HMS Terror) where they had said they were. Evidence of cannibalism among members of the Franklin expedition has categorically been proved by modern scientific methods. However, a few individuals still believe that men of the Royal Navy could not have committed cannibalism and that it was the Inuits who did.
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