A leather-bound folio found in one of Captain John Franklin’s doomed ships may just show how much other documents can be recovered in future searches, according to Canadian historian Ken McGugan.
The folio – a sort of book or journal – is among a total of 275 artefacts recovered last year from the HMS Erebus, one of two ships that disappeared in the 1800s in the Arctic. Other items include things like a quill pen, stoneware plates, plates and serving plates. The remains are located 11 meters below the surface of the Northwest Passage. Even deeper is the other ship, HMS Terror.
Erebus and Terror set sail from England in 1845. Commander Sir John Franklin and his 129 men never returned.
Since 2014, when Erebus was finally discovered (and Terror, two years later), with a combination of Inuit oral history and systematic, high-tech surveys, Parks Canada has been working to understand what’s down there and what light can to throw on a story that has become part of the Canadian tradition.
McGoogan believes the information gleaned from the folio, which was found in the Erebus’s closet during a diving expedition by Parks Canada archaeologists last year, may be limited but still valuable.
“It could be just, you know, ‘last week we ate 14 cans of beef,’ for example,” he said.
For McGoogan, one of the first questions is whether modern-day conservationists can decipher what’s in the book after all this time it’s been in the ocean.
Ryan Harris, who was part of the 2022 field season on the HMS Erebus wreck, said the book, which he said was one of the best finds, was currently being analyzed in a laboratory.
McGoogan said that no matter what is written in the book, if researchers can decipher it, that would be a victory in itself.
“That’s interesting in itself because if they can, that’s a very good sign for future discoveries,” McGugan said.
Ken McGugan is a Canadian historian and author. (https://kenmcgoogan.blogspot.com)
What would be very exciting to find in future searches, he said, would be “some kind of log that can track what happened during the expedition through time,” he said. McGoogan thinks things like that are likely to be in the officers’ cabin.
“People have never gotten to the root cause of why this expedition ended in disaster.”
And he said that major question is likely to remain.
McGoogan recently wrote a new book, Searching for Franklin: The Royal Navy Man who Couldn’t Listen, which points the finger at Franklin himself as someone who couldn’t listen to Northerners.
He said he had two reasons to think Franklin was “deaf” to the wisdom that might have been imparted to him by the native people.
“Firstly, he was a Royal Navy man through and through. And that made you follow your orders no matter what,” he said.
Parks Canada Research Associate Jonathan Pukiknak at the Qiniqtirjuaq Barge Artifact Washing Station cleaning a corner shelf of an officer’s cabin retrieved from HMS Erebus in September 2022 (Parks Canada)
Franklin’s faith, McGugan said, may have played a role.
“Evangelical Christianity also made him impervious to advice and counsel from anyone who was not already a Christian. So, you know, he’s made of his time that way,” McGugan said.
McGoogan said a question that also left him scratching his head was why “such a disproportionate number of officers and crew” appeared to have died before the men left the ship. Many researchers, according to McGoogan, have come to believe that in April 1848, 105 men disembarked from the two ice-locked ships, and that a note found later said that nine officers and 15 sailors had died before that. representing 37 percent of the officers and 14 percent of the crew.
“Now, that’s strange to say the least,” McGugan said, “why so many more officers [died] compared to the number of crews.”
As for the Terror, the other ship that sank, McGoogan thinks it’s possible a log of daily events will emerge from it one day during searches, as he said the ship is known to be better preserved.
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