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We are delighted to have Erika Behrisch Elce, editor of As affecting the fate of my absent husband: Selected Letters of Lady Franklin Concerning the Search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 1848-1860, as our guest blogger today!
Just last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was elated to announce the discovery of one of Sir John Franklin’s ships, missing since 1846. Lady Franklin, were she here today, would likely ask, “What took you so long?” In 1855, Lady Franklin had urged the Admiralty to undertake one last comprehensive search of the area “in the neighbourhood of the great Fish river,” and the ship, found off Hat Island, was right where she anticipated.
Initially crushed by the news of mass death and cannibalism that reached England in late 1854, Lady Franklin quickly rallied to draw out the central message of the Inuit report: her husband’s location was known. As the wife and then widow of the missing rear-admiral, Lady Franklin kept current on all the developments of the international search for her husband, delivering scathing critiques of Admiralty methods, as well as heart-wrenching appeals for more aid. For her own final search in 1857 she wrote the sailing instructions herself, and the Fox, under Captain Leopold McClintock, sailed to King William Island where they recovered the first written record of the Franklin Expedition’s fate.
Lady Franklin’s letters to powerful public figures of the day – US President Zachary Taylor, Admiralty First Lord Sir Charles Wood, future Prime Ministers Lord Palmerston and Benjamin Disraeli – encouraged further searches and kept the plight of her husband and his companions in the public eye. And in spite of her preference to be “kept out of sight as much as possible,” she became a unique and powerful symbol of feminine courage within what was a tragedy of masculine bravado. In the press, she was the “Penelope of England,” and her own fortitude eventually brought honour to the tarnished memory of her husband.
Unique among books on the Franklin Expedition, As affecting the fate of my absent husband: Selected Letters of Lady Franklin Concerning the Search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 1848-1860 (part of MQUP’s Native and Northern Series), lets Lady Franklin speak for herself as an individual woman coping with an international disaster. The edition brings together for the first time Lady Franklin’s letters to the men who spoke on her behalf, and shows her as a powerful voice in her own right. It is essential reading for those interested in the ongoing search for Sir John Franklin, his ships, and his story.
The following is one of Lady Franklin’s letters, addressed to Lord Palmerston in 1855, excerpted from As affecting the fate of my absent husband.
To: [LORD PALMERSTON]
60 Pall Mall, London, [Tuesday] 26 June 1855
Source: Handwritten copy, h, a/iv/n/9b
Editorial comment: Written in the same hand as h, a/iv/n/5a, b, and c. [sic]: there are no possessive apostrophes in this transcript.
June 26. 1855
My Lord
As the widow of Sir John Franklin I trust I may be excused for intruding a few moments on your time, in reference to the Arctic Select Committee of the House of Commons, which has received your Lordships sanction as First Minister of the Crown.
Sir John Richardson in a letter published in the Times of the 23rd has claimed for the Erebus and Terror under the command of my late husband, the first discovery of a N. W. Passage, and he treats this as a fact beyond dispute.
That this fact has not been earlier & generally recognised is doubtless owing to the discoveries of Captain McClure having become known in this country above a year before the arrival of Dr Rae last autumn. / It was the testimony of Dr Rae confirmed by the indisputable relics he procured & brought home, which proves that a large body of men belonging to the Erebus and Terror were seen alive on the North American coast in the neighbourhood of the great Fish river in the Spring of 1850, and this fact, in connection with the other circumstances referred to by Sir John Richardson is, though not the accomplishment of the N. W. Passage, nothing less than the discovery of it.
Captain McClures discovery of another passage which he also was unable to accomplish, in a remoter quarter of the Arctic Sea, was made 6 months later than the above. The one left his ship (the Investigator) inextricably fixed in the ice, a perishable trophy of his memorable enterprise, – the bleached bones of the others (the crews of the Erebus & Terror) lie unburied / on the shore, sad but conclusive memorials of a noble discovery, which had already cost those brave men 5 years of unknown trial & suffering.
They have not perished in vain, – but they are beyond the reach of their countrys rewards & honors, and the humble individual who now addresses you, has nothing to gain, and nothing to desire, in advocating the claims of those who cannot speak for themselves, beyond the recognition of a truth honorable to the memory of the dead, and which detracts nothing from the merits of the living.
Captain McClure and those other brave & distinguished men who have risked their lives in the service of humanity, and who in so doing have greatly extended our knowledge of the earths surface, & helped to set at rest the problem of centuries, are well entitled to all the rewards their admiring / country can bestow, and have an especial claim on my own deep and life long gratitude.
I believe I should not have ventured in troubling your lordship with this letter could I have felt sure that Sir John Richardsons letter which had escaped my own observation, and another letter which appeared in the Times of yesterday from Dr Rae, would come under the notice of the Committee appointed to investigate the claims of Captn McClure.
The authority of Sir John Richardson, himself one of the most distinguished of Arctic discoverers, and the first to devote himself to the search of his friend & former companion in peril, is I am well aware, entitled to a consideration which ought to make any observations of my own, superfluous.
I have the honor to be
my lord
Your lordships very obedient servant
(signed) Jane Franklin
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