On the morning of May 19, 1845, Captain John Franklin and his expedition weighed anchor from the Greenhithe Harboralmost at the mouth of the Thames. They were looking for the Northwest Passagethe (at that time theoretical) maritime route that would link the Atlantic and the Pacific through northern Canada.
They never came home. 129 men who never returned and who, for 170 years, have been one of the great questions of scientific and naval exploration. We now know why the men of John Franklin’s lost exploration died.
There are those who insinuate that the trip started badly from the beginning. It should never have been in the first place. John Franklin. The first option William Edward Parryone of the great English explorers, but he had already traveled to the Arctic five times and “was tired.” So he declined the offer.
Secondly, they thought about James Clark Ross. Ross has just arrived from Antarctica where he had explored the Ross Sea and Island. In fact, the ships on that expedition were the same as those that would be used on this mission (two of Ross Island volcanoes They are called Erebus and Terror in honor of the ships). But upon returning to England, he became engaged to his future wife and decided that great explorations were no longer for him.
He was followed by James Fitzjames (discarded due to inexperience), George Back (considered too controversial) and Francis Crozier (who, well, was Irish and that was more than enough reason to rule him out). Seeing the yard, John Barrow, second secretary of the Admiralty, called John Franklin.
To this day no one knows why Franklin, who was already a legend at the time and was almost 60 years old, he said yes. But the fact is that, as I said, they left the vicinity of London that day in 1845. They stopped in Orkney and the convoy formed by the two main ships (HMS Erebus and HMS Terror), the HMS Rattler (the first English warship with steam propulsion) and a transport headed to Greenland.
There they sacrificed ten oxen and the expedition began its solo journey.
The search for the Northwest Passage
The travels of Marco Polo are a peculiar book. Not only does it remain a very interesting precedent for current anthropology, but it served as an inspiration for many during the era of great exploration. The image you can see above is precisely the annotated copy of ‘The Voyages’ that Christopher Columbus had.
In one of its versions, the Italian one from 1559, a Chinese province called Anian. We assume that it was from there that the geographers and explorers who discussed whether America was a new continent or, on the contrary, an Asian peninsula, got the name of the Strait of Anian, the separation between Asia and America that would give access to the Northwest Passage.
It is what we know today as the Bering Strait and for years it was pure mythology. But, first, Ferdinand Magellan and his crew turned around Cape Espiritu Santo and found themselves face to face with the southeastern passage; and, second, a Dane in the service of Russia, Vitus Beringrediscovered for the West the strait through which Semyon Dezhniov had already traveled sixty years before.
The rest was geopolitics: the quick passage to the Pacific without having to pass near the Spanish territories in America was too juicy. In 1745, an English law promised 20,000 pounds to whoever discovered the pass and the boom began. I have tried to convert the amount to a current currency and I have not been able to do it accurately, but I have drawn one conclusion: it was a lot of money.
Favorable weather
In early August 1845, two whalers, the Prince of Wales and the Enterprise, encountered Franklin’s ships in Baffin Bay. They were waiting for favorable weather to enter the Strait of Lancaster. That was the last time they were seen.
Two years passed. And, little by little, Lady Jane Franklin, some members of Parliament, and the fledgling British press began to ask the Admiralty to send someone to search for the heroes of Franklin’s expedition. The Government sent three expeditions: one by land and two by sea, one through the Atlantic and another through the Pacific. They failed.
Fearing that they would be forgotten, Lady Jane Franklin composed her lament, the song you can hear just above. And, although I don’t know if it was for that reason, the truth is that was not forgotten. In fact, the search for the lost expedition “became nothing less than a crusade.” In 1850 alone, eleven British and two American ships tried to locate them.
It was then that the first tombs were found. Over the years, the different expeditions found fragments, Inuit stories and objects from the expedition. In 1855, following the indications of some Inuit tribes, pieces of wood were found with the name of Erebus. In 59 two messages were found. The first, dated May 28, 1847, was from Franklin himself and read “Sir John Franklin, Commander of the Expedition: All Well.”
It is the document on the right. It was a common practice at the time, documents were left in different places so that, in case of problems, they could be reconstruct the details of the trip. But in this case, something curious happened: on the edges there was another message, dated April 25, 1848, explaining that the ships had been trapped in the ice.
Franklin and twenty-three other crew members were dead. And the rest, the survivors, had abandoned the ships looking for an exit to the south. In the next few years some objects, some rumors and some tombs appeared. Nothing else. The ships never appeared and we never, in 150 years, discovered what had really happened to Captain John Franklin’s lost expedition.
One hundred and fifty years without news
In the 1980s, the University of Alberta launched a project to track the expedition. The different possible routes were traveled on foot, bodies were exhumed and evidence of cannibalism was even found. But the ships resisted.
It took 30 years for the first of them to appear in Queen Maud Gulf between 2008 and 2014. And yet, the fundamental question remained: Why did they die? Not about “what they died”, we know that there are signs of pneumonia and tuberculosis. But “why they died.” I mean, they were experienced explorers, they had more than enough supplies, they knew the terrain they were traveling in, and, as far as we know, they came into contact with the native peoples. What happened?
The first studies indicated that there very possibly had been lead poisoning. There are several possibilities to explain it, such as, for example, ship plumbing. But to understand the most accepted one we must go back to a specific moment in the year 1845. It is not very clear what happened, but there were problems in preparing the provisions for the trip. The 8,000 cans of food needed were ordered at the last minute and, as a result, were produced in a “crude and careless manner.” The cans were soldered with lead.
In 2013, a group of researchers decided put the idea to the test performing heavy metal tests to the remains that had been found. The results confirmed that the levels were high, but no higher than those that were typical in the seafaring population of the time. We were back at a dead end. But researchers did not give up and have tried tooth and nail to find the reason.
And never better said. Jennie Christensen and his team econstructed diet and health status from a crew member from that, from a fingernail. Thanks to this analysis they have been able to determine how the levels of heavy metals changed in the last days of the Franklin crew. Everything seems to indicate that the problem was a zinc deficiency.
The lack of zinc It causes emotional instability, gastrointestinal problems and depression of the immune system. That is to say, not only does it increase the chances of contracting tuberculosis and pneumonia that killed them, but it could also contribute to internal problems within the group.
Zinc, all this time it has always been zinc. And it only took us 170 years to find the key. There is still a lot to do to elucidate all the details, but it never ceases to amaze me how much we have managed to do with science and technology. Getting out of a fingernail an answer that we have been looking for for so long is no wonder.
In Xataka | The Romans were thirsty for oil and we have just found in Tunisia the second largest press of the Empire
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings