Captain Sir John Franklin remained serene through all of this because of two things: his faith and his wife. Sir John’s devout Christianity buoyed him up even when the press of responsibility and frustration collaborated to press him down. Everything that happened was, he knew and fervently believed, God’s will. What seemed inevitable to the others need not be in a universe administered by an interested and merciful God. The ice might suddenly break up in midsummer, now less than six weeks away, and even a few weeks of sailing and steaming time would bring them triumphantly to the North-West Passage. They would steam west along the coast as long as they had coal, then sail the rest of the way to the Pacific, escaping the far northern latitudes sometime in mid-September just before the pack ice solidified again. Franklin had experienced greater miracles in his lifetime. Just being appointed commander of this expedition — at age sixty, after the humiliation of Van Diemen’s Land — had been a greater miracle.
As deep and sincere as Sir John’s faith in God was, his faith in his wife was even deeper and sometimes more frightening. Lady Jane Franklin was an indomitable woman… indomitable was the only word for her. Her will knew no bounds and in almost every instance, Lady Jane Franklin would bend the errant and arbitrary ways of the world to the iron command of her will. Already, he imagined, after being out of touch for two full winters, his wife had mobilized her very impressive private fortune, public contacts, and apparently limitless force of will to cajole the Admiralty, the Parliament, and God alone knew what other agencies into searching for him.
This last fact bothered Sir John somewhat. Above all else, he did not want to be “rescued” — approached either overland or by sea during the brief summer thaw by hastily assembled expeditions under the command of whiskey-breath Sir John Ross or the young Sir James Ross (who would be forced out of his arctic retirement, Sir John was sure, by Lady Jane’s demands). That way lay shame and ignominy.
But Sir John remained serene because he knew that the Admiralty was not moved quickly on any matter, not even by such a forceful fulcrum and lever as his wife Jane. Sir John Barrow and the other members of the mythical Arctic Council, not to mention Sir John’s official superiors in the Royal Navy Discovery Service, knew quite well that HMS Erebus and HMS Terror had provisions for three years, longer if severe rations were imposed, not to mention the capability of fishing and hunting game should they ever come in sight of any. Sir John knew that his wife — his indomitable wife — would force a rescue should it come to that, but the terrible and wonderful inertia of the Royal Navy would almost certainly ensure that such a rescue attempt would not be outfitted until the spring and summer of 1848, if not later.
Accordingly, in late May of 1847, Sir John prepared five sledge parties to look over the horizons in each direction, including one instructed to sledge back the way they had come, searching for any open water. They departed on May 21, 23, and 24, with Lieutenant Gore’s party — the crucial one — departing last and sledging toward King William Land to the southeast.
Besides reconnoitering, First Lieutenant Graham Gore had a second important responsibility — leaving Sir John’s first written message cached ashore since the beginning of the expedition.
Here Captain Sir John Franklin had come as close to disobeying orders as he ever had in his Naval lifetime. His instructions from the Admiralty had been to erect cairns and to leave messages in caches for the length of his exploration — should the ships not appear beyond the Bering Strait on schedule, this would be the only way for Royal Navy rescue ships to know in which direction Franklin had headed and what might have caused their delay. But Sir John had not left such a message at Beechey Island, even though he had almost nine months to prepare one. In truth, Sir John had hated that first cold anchorage — had been ashamed of the deaths of the three crewmen by consumption and pneumonia that winter — so he had privately decided to leave the graves behind as the only message he needed to send. With any luck, no one would find the graves for years after his victory of forcing the North-West Passage had been bannered everywhere in the world.
But it had now been almost two years since his last dispatch to his superiors, so Franklin dictated an update to Gore and set it in an airtight brass cylinder — one of two hundred he’d been supplied with.
He personally instructed Lieutenant Gore and Second Mate Charles Des Voeux on where to put the message — into the six-foot-high cairn left on King William Land by Sir James Ross some seventeen years earlier at the westernmost point of his own explorations. It would be, Franklin knew, the first place the Navy would look for word of his expedition, since it was the last landmark on everyone’s maps.
Looking at the lone squiggle of that last landmark on his own map in the privacy of his cabin on the morning before Gore, Des Voeux, and six crewmen set out, Sir John had to smile. In an act of respect seventeen years ago — not to mention an act now generating some minor irony — Ross had named the westernmost promontory along the shore Victory Point and then named the nearby highlands Cape Jane Franklin and Franklin Point. It was as if, Sir John thought, looking down at the weathered sepia map with its black lines and large unfilled spaces to the west of the carefully marked Victory Point, Destiny or God had brought him and these men here.
His dictated message — it was in Gore’s handwriting — was, Sir John thought, succinct and businesslike:
_____ of May 1847. HM Ships Erebus and Terror… Wintered in the Ice in Lat. 70°05′ N. Long. 98°23′ W. Having wintered in 1846–7 at Beechey Island in Lat. 74°43′28″ N Long. 90°39′15″ W after having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat. 77° — and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All well. Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 Men left the ships on Monday 24th. May 1847. Gm. Gore, Lieut. Chas. F. Des Voeux, mate.
Franklin instructed Gore and Des Voeux to sign the note and fill in the date before sealing the canister and setting it deep inside James Ross’s cairn.
What Franklin hadn’t noticed during his dictation — nor Lieutenant Gore corrected — was that he had given the wrong dates for their winter at Beechey Island. It had been the first winter of 1845–46 in their sheltered ice harbour at Beechey; this year’s terrible time in the open pack ice had been the winter of 1846–47.
No matter. Sir John was convinced that he was leaving a minor message to posterity — possibly to some Royal Navy historian who wished to add an artifact to Sir John’s future report on the expedition (Sir John fully planned to write another book, the proceeds of which would bring his private fortune almost up to that of his wife’s) — and not dictating a report that would be read by anyone in the immediate future.