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ANDREW LAMBERT: My name is Andrew Lambert, I'm the Laughton Professor of Naval history at King's College, London. John Franklin was a Royal Naval officer

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who spent the latter half of his career pursuing Arctic exploration in a search for increased knowledge about phenomena in the Arctic, particularly the Earth's magnetic field.

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Terrestrial magnetism becomes the defining project of his career. He begins his service at the battle of Copenhagen, under Nelson in 1801.

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He then serves with his cousin Matthew Flinders on the first circumnavigation of Australia, where his job is to conduct the magnetic data gathering. So even as a midshipman, Franklin

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has engaged in what is going to become his life's work. He returns to England, he fights at Trafalgar, he serves through the rest of the Napoleonic Wars, and is present at the Battle of New Orleans

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right at the end of the Anglo-American war of 1812. But significantly, he misses the promotion that he needed to Commander, so he's only a Lieutenant at the end of the war.

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And he really needs some way of finding that promotion step because a Lieutenant's pay is not very good. Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, who was Matthew Flinders patron, and had really generated

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that Australian expedition, picks up Franklin as a legacy issue. He's Flinders' cousin, Flinders has died, and both Flinders and Franklin lived

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in the same village as Joseph Banks's estate in Lincolnshire. So it's local, it's familial, and so when they're appointing officers for the Arctic expeditions of 1816 and '17, Franklin gets picked.

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And he initially goes out to Spitsbergen on a not particularly successful expedition, but he comes back, having done a good job. And he's then given his first big job,

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which is the overland expedition up through Canada, up on to the North Canadian shore to check the coast of Canada and to move as far to the west as possible to forestall potential Russian moves out of Alaska.

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So he's charting, he's recording magnetic data for the Royal Society, but he's also putting a marker on the ground to say this is British, we own this, and Hudson's Bay Company will continue to trap

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and sell the skins of small furry animals, most of which turn up as top hats in London. After that, he is a celebrity, he writes a fabulous account of a really difficult experience.

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They nearly starved to death, there are several cases of cannibalism. Several of their porters are killed and eaten, and Franklin manages to avoid the implication that he might

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have been involved in this. He becomes a celebrity, he becomes a star. He gets his promotion and he gets sent back to do a second expedition of a different route through Canada,

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with more magnetic science. He comes back from that, which is a more successful expedition, writes a second book. He becomes a captain, he's knighted,

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he becomes a Fellow of the Royal Society, an academician of the French Royal Academy. He's a really significant cultural figure in early 19th century Europe.

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And then he goes back into the regular service of the Navy, he's involved in the creation of Greece, the Greco-Turkish war, where he's basically policing the curious politics of Greece as it becomes a state.

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After that, because there is no possibility of finding a Northwest Passage, he goes off to be the Governor of Tasmania, which he renamed. It was called Van Diemen's Land but, he names it Tasmania

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after the explorer who found it, rather than the colonial governor who it was named for. He comes back from that under something of a cloud, he's been dismissed by the Tory government, he was a liberal.

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And so when a final expedition to the Arctic is being mooted, he puts his name forward and he's sent to command the final expedition. It's often said that Franklin's final expedition was an attempt

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to finish the Northwest Passage, to complete a 40 year assault on the Canadian Arctic, to get through to the other side to prove that the British could do this. There is no way that a cash-strapped mid-Victorian

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government was going to spend a large amount of money and send two ships and over 130 men to solve a geographic curiosity. Everybody knew there was no economic utility

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in making this passage. By this period, the Russian threat coming out of Alaska had gone away, so there was no terrestrial threat. These were the things that had propelled the early voyages.

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The bulk of Franklin's instructions concerned scientific projects and they were dominated by terrestrial magnetism. His job was to get to magnetic north, which

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was on the south end of the Somerset Peninsula at the time, and to record there a long dataset of the Earth's magnetic variation and intensity. He had a dozen officers, all of whom

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were heavily trained for magnetic observation. Also, the ship's surgeons were heavily trained, so he had a group of trained scientific observers, data gatherers.

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He was, himself, highly experienced in this field. His second in command, Francis Crozier, was even more experienced than Franklin. He was on the Antarctic expedition,

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in the same vessels that used that data to locate magnetic south. So the men on this expedition, this was their purpose. This was the specialised training they received.

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They had several tonnes of equipment. They had non-magnetic buildings that had been knocked down they could put up, so they could conduct these observations day after day after day.

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This wasn't about eureka moments, this was about eureka months. They were going to be doing this for a very long time. Watching a magnetic needle move through a microscope

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in a very cold space, for a very long period of time, requires heroic skills. Not the kind of outdoor, big boys exploring heroic skills but persistence, endurance, commitment, resolve,

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an obsession with accuracy, and this is what Franklin and his men brought to this mission. They were going to bring back a dataset that would coordinate with all the other global magnetic datasets.

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That is the project. Anything else they might achieve up there-- adding to the charts, possibly even sailing through to the other side--

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was an add-on benefit. The mission was that, had they come back with those datasets, they would have been heralded as heroes. Had they come back and completed the Northwest Passage

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as well, likewise. But if they'd achieved either of those objectives, they would have done very well, but the science was the big project.

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The people who pushed this agenda with the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Hydrographer of the Navy, the one thing they had in common, magnetic science.

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That is the big driver. That is why Franklin, not anybody else commands, because he is the man with the experience, the expertise, the track record, to deliver on that.

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And had things turned out differently he would indeed have delivered on that, and he'd be remembered as the man who brought back the data from magnetic north, rather than

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as the leader of an expedition that went tragically wrong. The problem is that Franklin's science, terrestrial magnetism as a navigational aid, was a dead end. Terrestrial magnetism does not give you

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any navigational benefits. So historians of science have forgotten it. And historians of navigation tend to concentrate on navigating ships through the passage

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rather than checking the charts. But the men who sent Franklin, and Franklin himself, were obsessed with the idea that there might be a navigational system, a kind of Victorian GPS,

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that you could get from the Earth's moving magnetic core. And the failure of that condemned Franklin's story to be one of Northwest Passage, cannibalism, and failure. He didn't fail.

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They got to magnetic north, they conducted the research. They failed to get home, and the records have not survived. But the expedition achieved its objectives. Almost as soon as Franklin became overdue,

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and before anybody knew what had actually happened, various interest groups popped up to say, well this has gone wrong, that has gone wrong. It was suggested that Franklin was simply

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too old to lead the expedition, which was nonsense. When they found the first remains of the expedition on Beechey Island, they found a lot of empty tins with lead solder inside them, and they concluded

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that the tins of meat had been infected by the solder, that the men had consumed large amounts of lead, and this had caused the problems that may even have killed them. Lead poisoning doesn't kill, it will make people quite crazy,

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but the body will get rid of the lead. And then argued it might have been botulism, there's no evidence for this. It was then suggested that they might

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have got into various bits of the Arctic and couldn't get out. That was true, but the one place they didn't look was the obvious place, which was right next to magnetic north.

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James Clark Ross, who led the first search expedition, knew precisely where to look because he found magnetic north in 1831, and he and Franklin were very, very close.

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He couldn't get to magnetic north, the weather was too bad, they ran out of supplies, and his men failed physically under the stress. So even at the beginning, somebody knew the answer,

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but everybody else came up with a host of theories. The benefit of those crazy theories was that they looked everywhere, and the map of Arctic Canada was created in the 1850s and '60s

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while they searched for Franklin. And because they looked everywhere but where he'd been, they mapped a very large swath of the Canadian north, establishing Canadian sovereignty,

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and extending the understanding of the region. And in the process, they found that there wasn't a Northwest Passage, there were several, and that none of them were of any use to small wooden sailing ships.

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It was simply impossible for a 300 tonne wooden vessel to get through. The first people to transit the passage walked, and the first man to actually sail from side to side

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was Roald Amundsen in 1904. So this was economically useless and Franklin knew it. So the idea that he was looking for a Northwest Passage in 1845, he wasn't.

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That wasn't what the expedition was about. He was to go to a place and do a big science project. If he sailed out the other side, all well and good, but that wasn't the main objective.

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The one thing the Victorians didn't want to talk about is what happened to the men. In 1853, the Hudson's Bay traveller John Rae came back with clear information of large-scale survival

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cannibalism obtained from local Inuit hunting parties, along with relics of the expedition. Lady Franklin refused to believe that her husband could have been involved in this, and of course he'd been dead for long

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enough that he wasn't. And the British public rather assumed that Englishmen wouldn't do this. Charles Dickens famously said that this

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must be the work of the Inuit, they're not like the English. Rae then provided the evidence and Dickens changed his mind and he said he couldn't believe that English gentleman would do this.

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So from being an issue of race, it became one of class. Only common sailors would have eaten each other, a gentleman wouldn't stoop so low. So there was a great aversion to the cannibal theory.

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And Lady Franklin sent Leopold McClintock out to prove that Franklin had found the Northwest Passage and there'd been no cannibalism. McClintock comes back in 1859, having

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found the remains of the expedition on King William Island, and he managed to write a book in which he avoided mentioning the two salient facts that he had discovered.

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Franklin had not found the Northwest Passage, and there had been large-scale cannibalism. But McClintock was a good man, he did precisely what his sponsor directed, and produced

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a very fine book which managed not to tell the story of what had happened. And with that, the issue was largely closed. A great statue was put up in Waterloo Place,

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by the unanimous vote of both Houses of Parliament, and it said that Franklin and his men had laid down their lives to complete the Northwest Passage. This was a lie, but it's a very large brass lie on a granite

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plinth, and so it has an enduring power far beyond the printed word. That is not what Franklin did. He did many things, many of which are very important,

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but he didn't do that. The Franklin expedition breaks down some time in 1847. Franklin dies, other men on the expedition die, quite a lot of officers have died,

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the men are clearly in poor health, and they march off to their deaths. The only contact they have with the outside world is an Inuit hunting party who recorded

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that their mouths were black-- they had the scurvy, their teeth had fallen out, their gums were in poor condition-- and they noted that they were carrying human limbs.

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At which point, the Inuit decided to withdraw. So why did the Franklin expedition break down at that point, when it still had some food left, and would still have had some lemon juice,

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the great antiscorbutic. What we do know is that in the first winter of the expedition, 1845-6, they anchored up at Beechey Island and three men died and were buried

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on the island in the permafrost. They were exhumed by John Beattie in the 1980s and they were autopsied. These men had died essentially of tuberculosis,

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their lungs had been destroyed by a highly aggressive strain of tuberculosis. But these men not only died of this disease, but they died in small 300 tonne wooden vessels

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that were tightly sealed up, unheated, where everybody was rebreathing the same damp atmosphere. These are perfect conditions for the spread of tuberculosis. So it's highly likely that other men on the ships were infected.

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Those three men almost certainly brought the disease with them, they were infected and probably mortally so before they even sailed, that other men on the ship would have been infected by that, maybe treated them,

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but other shipmates. We know from bone fragments found on King William Island that other men were also tubercular. This would have been very debilitating,

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even in the early stages, but it may have led to a rash of early deaths. And we know that a lot of men had died by the time they abandoned ship.

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They would have had no understanding of why this was happening. They would have known what the disease was, it was called consumption in those days,

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that this may have played a significant part in the final destruction of the Franklin expedition. Far more so than lead poisoning or botulism. It's almost certainly the single proximate cause

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of heavy loss of life. Because earlier Arctic expeditions, even ones that had teetered on the brink of complete disaster, had suffered very few losses.

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Very few men died in the Arctic-- even on John Ross's long and very difficult last Arctic expedition-- human casualties, minimal.

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Suffering, yes, but loss of life, no. This expedition was uniquely destructive, even before they abandoned ship. A lot of officers died, that just didn't happen.

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Men died, that didn't happen. Other expeditions, one man, two men, the odd accident, the odd older man dying of natural causes, all related. But this expedition was uniquely fatal

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long before they abandoned ship. Something was killing those men, and the most likely cause is tuberculosis. We can't absolutely prove that because we

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don't have the ship's records, we don't have the medical journals, but there is enough evidence to show that three men died of tuberculosis and other men were tubercular.

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And given the nature of their environment, overwintering in these hot, damp boxes rebreathing the same atmosphere, this is the most likely cause of heavy human loss on the expedition, which

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may have led to the decision to abandon ship. It has almost everything you need for a great story. It has larger-than-life characters, it has truly appalling things, it has fascinating science,

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and a location that isolates and almost insulates you from what's happening. It's like it's happening on another planet. But of course, this is part of the fascination of the period.

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We know that Mary Shelley sets the end of Frankenstein in the Arctic. This is the period when the Arctic becomes an obsession. So Franklin is in there, and the fact that he goes missing

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and the mystery is not fully solved keeps him alive long after his death in 1848. Franklin lives on and on because we don't know, we don't know exactly what happened,

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we don't know exactly what was going on. The data doesn't survive, the records of the expedition disappeared. So that the last mystery is we have

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263 words written on a scrap of paper, and that is the entire written record of this exploration and this navigational mission. And even though we've now found Franklin's two

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ships, the Erebus and Terror, we still don't know what went wrong. Lady Jane Franklin, Franklin's second wife, was a really rather remarkable woman.

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Almost certainly the best travelled woman in 19th century Europe, she went everywhere, America, Australasia, New Zealand. The one place she didn't go was the Arctic.

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Jane Franklin becomes the managing agent of her husband's career, she becomes the person who drives his career in the years after they marry, middle 1820s. She is the person who drives the search for Franklin.

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She's the one who keeps people going back to the Arctic. It's not the government, they give up quite quickly, it's not the establishment, it's ultimately Lady Jane Franklin and her allies.

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She wants to solve this problem, not because she thinks they'll find Franklin, but because she wants to make sure that Franklin's name is remembered for the right reasons,

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and she knows what those reasons are. Heroic explorer. So she creates John Franklin the heroic explorer. The statue in Waterloo Place is her monument to what

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she wanted her husband to be. They've made Franklin taller, more physically imposing, they've given him a motto, which is not true, Lady Jane wrote that motto.

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She was there when they opened the statue. That was the capstone of her 20 year project to rescue her husband from the idea of failure and cannibalism, and the monument

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manages to do both of those things. It's a powerful Victorian statement of purpose. So that's her object and her methods are really quite striking.

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She is very well connected, she knows everybody who moves in London circles, she has friends inside the Admiralty building, John Barrow Jr. is one of her key allies,

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she knows all the leading men of science, men like Roderick Murchison, these are people who have real influence. Charles Dickens is a close friend.

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Dickens not only writes about the Franklin's story but he produces a play with Wilkie Collins about the frozen north. The one thing she doesn't like in the contemporary response

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to Franklin is Edwin Landseer's wonderful picture, Man Proposes, God Disposes, in which two polar bears eat the remains of the expedition. That she objected to.

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She has a clear sense of purpose and that is to rescue her husband's fame from the slurs that have been cast on it by all the doubters. And in that, she is triumphantly successful.

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Franklin, by the 1870s, is a great national hero who, like Nelson, lay down his life for a higher cause. Among the more important names in Arctic exploration is that of John Barrow.

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Of course, many people forget there are two John Barrows, John Barrow, Sr., Sir John Barrow, who was Admiralty Secretary from 1806 through to 1845, and had a critical role in generating, sustaining,

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and completely publicising the earlier Arctic expeditions. Sir John Barrow died in 1847, but he remained very much a presence in the Franklin mission; he wrote the mission statement, because he

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was a great man for writing official statements, and he was a supporter of the project. He wrote the British narrative history of Arctic exploration, so he shaped the agenda.

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And it was a geographically-shaped agenda. Barrow was a geographer, he travelled to China on the Macartney expedition. He'd written about South Africa, and he

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was the President of the Royal Geographical Society, and he was the man who presided over John Murray's extensive list of exploration publications. He's the reviewer who critiques all of these things when

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they come out. The man he doesn't like in the Arctic, John Ross, he rubbishes his book, in print, because Ross disagrees with Barrow.

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So Barrow is a very powerful figure. He's close to all of these figures, Francis Beaufort the hydrographer, Franklin, James Clark Ross, Parry, they're all working in a very small, confined, central London

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world. And Barrow is in many ways the coordinator, the key figure. He's in the Royal Society, he's in the Royal Geographical, he works for the Admiralty.

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His son John Barrow, Jr. becomes an Admiralty clerk and is involved not just in the Franklin search, but is involved in liaising with Lady Franklin against the wishes of his superiors,

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and with many of the explorers who go searching for Franklin. And he generates an enormously impressive archive of personal correspondence with everybody who goes. He knows all of these people.

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He has Stephen Pearce paint their portraits. He has a collective portrait of the leading men called The Arctic Council. So he is really celebrating work that his father was heavily

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involved in, the work of these leading men who've been there, but he's a close ally of Lady Franklin as well, and he's left a very important collection, part of which is now the official Admiralty file

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on the Franklin expedition. But so much of the correspondence is clearly not official. It is personal correspondence with John Barrow,

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Jr. by the men who've gone. So it's a slightly odd file, you're looking at something which is meant to be the state record, but in fact, it's a combination of state material

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and private material which Barrow, who was involved in running the Admiralty record office, has artificially created. It's not an original document, it's

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a combination of two different kinds of material. And so you can write quite a lot of the history of the Franklin expedition from that because you've got both the solid factual and also the personal.

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People are saying what they feel about this as well as what they've discovered, and that's quite a revealing kind of archive. His career doesn't go as far as it might have done,

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I think his superiors realised that he wasn't working entirely for the organisation but was working in the interests of outside parties. But he lived on and had a very interesting career

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after the Admiralty. So both Barrow Senior and Junior are critically involved in the generation and the publicity and the continuance of Arctic exploration.

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John Franklin's three expeditions transformed the map of the Canadian Arctic and created a coherent sense of how the islands-- the archipelago and the waterways-- connected up.

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His first two overland expeditions up the rivers, the Great Fish River and the Mackenzie, gets serious navigators up onto the North Shore of Canada, where the mainland ends and the archipelago begins.

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They chart, they record, they record the land and the sea. They make it possible for others to go back and to begin to understand how this bit of the navigation fits together with the area where Cook had begun

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to explore, coming in through the Bering Straits, and where others, including Franklin's friend Parry, had gone in through Lancaster Sound. So it was a three-way assault on the central Canadian issue.

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Franklin comes in from the south and does the southern link, he provides the middle section of what will become the Northwest Passage. And when he goes back in 1845, he's travelling over areas that

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have been previously navigated by Parry. He then opens up a new assault which takes him to the top end of King William Island, which had only been travelled by land by sledging parties.

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So he adds another section to the navigation of the Northwest Passage. But the job is not done. It's the men who come to search for Franklin,

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who come in through the Bering Strait, who come in through Lancaster Sound and attack from both directions, and the overland parties, ultimately between them finish off this discovery.

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Nobody discovered the Northwest Passage, everybody discovered a part of it. So Franklin does discover part of the Northwest Passage, on three separate occasions.

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But he doesn't discover all of it, he doesn't transit all of it. Nobody will do this in a ship until Amundsen in the 20th century, but it's a collective endeavour and almost all

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the contributors are Royal Navy officers commanding exploration vessels, and their names and the names of people they thought were important are all over the map of the Canadian Arctic. And if you go back to the maps before they started

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to reuse the local Inuit and Native American names, you can explore how exploration happens by reading the names as they come off each of the headlands, the islands, Banks Land, well, Sir Joseph Banks

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started all of this. Victoria Island, well, King William Island, this is the early 1830s, William is there. The Adelaide peninsula, William's consort.

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The founding fathers of the Athenaeum Club were written onto the north shore of Canada by John Franklin, because he had run out of royals and Admiralty Boards and other dignitaries.

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They're all there on the older maps, some are still there on the newer maps. So this is a collective, collaborative project, but the one thing that they do discover very early on

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is there is not an economically useful Northwest Passage. It is not possible for a contemporary ship to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And as Franklin's friend John Richardson

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said, until we have a greater kind of power available to us this will not be possible. And by greater power, today we think of a 15,000 tonne diesel-powered icebreaker.

00:29:18.590 - 00:29:32.170

You can go through the Northwest Passage with a modern ship. Franklin couldn't, and he knew he couldn't, and all the men of the time said we've got as far as we can. And this incremental chipping away at the Northwest Passage

00:29:32.170 - 00:29:41.180

was the only way of making that. This wasn't going to be one grand discovery. This isn't like the Cook voyage opening up eastern Australia and New Zealand,

00:29:41.180 - 00:29:50.470

large chunks of the Pacific. This is small pieces added to a story, because all of the time, the real story isn't the navigation, it's the science.

00:29:50.470 - 00:30:01.890

It's the magnetic science, and it's science about the shape of the earth. About electrical storms, understanding what makes an aurora borealis, Franklin is doing this.

00:30:01.890 - 00:30:13.010

He's working with Michael Faraday. So it's a combination of navigation and other sciences, all of which are being taken into this region by Royal Navy vessels.

00:30:13.010 - 00:30:33.570

And only the Navy could conduct this expedition, because it's large, it's expensive, and it requires a lot of specialist skills. John Franklin is a magnetic scientist at sea.

00:30:33.570 - 00:30:46.950

He goes to sea as a young man with his cousin Matthew Flinders on the investigative mission which circumnavigates Australia and one of the things that Flinders is particularly interested in is the effect of terrestrial magnetism

00:30:46.950 - 00:30:55.050

on the ship's compass. This is starting to become a problem because the further north or south you sail, the greater the variation.

00:30:55.050 - 00:31:08.370

His contemporary William Scoresby who is an Arctic whaler, discovers this and works on it with Joseph Banks around 1810-11. Flinders is working on this in the Australian waters in 1803-4

00:31:08.370 - 00:31:20.100

and this work comes together, but it does point to the need for further research in the high Arctic. This is the only place where these very high variations can be found and they can be understood there.

00:31:20.100 - 00:31:34.840

So when the expeditions start going into the high Arctic, magnetic variation becomes a critical part of it. As the charts of the Arctic become usable, particularly for whalers and another navigators in high latitudes,

00:31:34.840 - 00:31:45.910

it's clear that variations of 10%, 15%, 20% between true north and magnetic north mean that you can't really follow the chart, because the compass doesn't give you the ability to follow it.

00:31:45.910 - 00:31:55.410

You need to understand what the variation is, and it's that knowledge which propels the Hydrographer of the Navy, Francis Beaufort, to support these expeditions, and increasingly

00:31:55.410 - 00:32:07.380

from the early 1840s, he's printing on his charts predicted magnetic variation. He wants to know what the magnetic variation is likely to be so that navigators can anticipate that.

00:32:07.380 - 00:32:19.230

Otherwise, you will run into land where you think there's sea, with disastrous consequences. So this is a very practical science. It feeds into a much larger scientific quest

00:32:19.230 - 00:32:34.290

to understand how the Earth's magnetic field works, because it clearly fluctuates, and if that fluctuating magnetic field is predictable, in the same way that the movement of the heavenly bodies is predictable,

00:32:34.290 - 00:32:48.670

and can be used for navigation. In 1800 or so, Alexander Humboldt, standing on the equator in Peru says, I think we could navigate using just magnetic readings.

00:32:48.670 - 00:33:00.850

And that is the central question of the Arctic exploration from 1815 through to the 1850s. Can we use this to navigate, can we understand this phenomena in the same way we understand

00:33:00.850 - 00:33:12.440

the heavens, and use it. So as Humboldt says, in a fog, we could navigate with this. We don't need to see the heavens to navigate. It turns out that doesn't work.

00:33:12.440 - 00:33:24.360

And so Franklin's science, which is his life, is a dead end. It's a science that doesn't produce a product. It produces a negative answer. No, that doesn't work, you cannot navigate using this,

00:33:24.360 - 00:33:34.840

but you do need to understand magnetic variation in order to navigate anywhere on earth, ever. So he solves a big problem, but he doesn't solve the biggest problem, which

00:33:34.840 - 00:33:44.770

is can we navigate with this. But we do need to understand this and you begin through data gathering to master the ability to predict how much variation there will be

00:33:44.770 - 00:34:00.000

and within what range of variation you're operating. That is the great contribution of Franklin and his peer group. Men like James Clark Ross, William Edward Parry, these are Arctic navigators who specialise in magnetic science.

00:34:00.000 - 00:34:11.160

Ross's portrait has a magnetic dip circle under his right hand. He's saying this is what I do. And in my other hand, I've got a sword just in case.