If one were able to give a sat nav device - with satellite uplink - to Sir John Franklin in 1845, accurately mapping the whole of northern Canada and the relative positions of Erebus and Terror, would he have made it through the Northwest Passage or still be screwed?
Was navigation the main problem or was the technology just not there? It would take over half a century before it was traversed. Whadya reckon?
Unless your nav unit can predict ice formation (or even the presence of ice), it is doubtful that the folks who had no idea where they were supposed to go (vis-a-vis land masses) would have benefited.
Of course, had there been such maps, the expedition would have not been undertaken.
The entire purpose of the trip was to see IF there was a way.
Until the melting of the ice caps, there wasn’t any open path - as Franklin found out.
Napoleon would have liked battlefield radio too.
No, as already said, navigation wasn’t the main problem, ice was. Mariners of the day were remarkably adept at navigation with the aid of sextants and the like, and though Franklin would no doubt have appreciated a set of detailed nautical charts of the area he still wouldn’t have got through and would still have perished.
The tragedy of the Franklin expedition is that it was the best equipped that British technology knew how to mount, but all the luck was against him. They had thousands of pounds of the then-new concept of tinned meats and vegetables, and the ships even had auxiliary steam engines that were modified small locomotives with the wheels removed, connected to propeller shafts. It was the Apollo moon program of its time.
It didn’t help. For one thing, inter-annual sea ice was at record levels, and not only was his outward passage blocked, but when an exceptionally cold winter set in the ships were frozen where they lay. Worse, the modern miracle of tinned food turned out to have been sloppily sealed with lead by whoever was the lowest bidder to the Navy contract, and leached into the food. It became a nightmare scenario in which men started dying one by one, of lead poisoning, occasional scurvy, and eventually starvation and cold while trying to walk to the nearest Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trading outpost many hundreds of miles to the south, pulling supply sledges in the bitter cold. The worst of it was that lead poisoning also brings on psychological distress like delusions and paranoia while it kills you. All of these things and more beset the Franklin expedition, which had been so lavishly outfitted that the Admiralty was certain they would succeed in traversing the Northwest Passage.
Thanks for the replies, fellas, it does sound like they’d still be up shit creek without a paddle. Would it make any difference knowing King William Land was in fact King William Island? They could sail the other way round, maybe avoid the ice that they got stuck in?
To tack a rider question on, usedtobe flags up that the point of the expedition was to find if their was a Northwest Passage. I’d always heard that navigators and explorers at the time were sure that there was one, but that it was just a matter of finding it. Is my impression mistaken?
Apart from anything else, you’d have to launch a whole bunch of satellites too (though maybe that’s what you meant by satellite uplink). 
One of the articles I read indicated that they might have done better if they had gone down the east coast of King William Island, which tended not to have as much ice as the channel on the western side.
But I wouldn’t think that GPS would have helped. It wasn’t that they were lost. They knew exactly where they were, and they knew the course to take back east. It was the ice that blocked their way, plus knowing where you are doesn’t tell you if there is a passage to the west.
Oh, and the wiki on Ling William Island mentions that a British person in the area had seen the south coast of the island in the 1830’s, a decade before the expedition, so even if it wasn’t known for sure that it was an island, they must at least have known that there may have been a passage going down the east coast to the south.
Yes, they were pretty sure. By the time the Franklin expedition sailed, previous explorations by William Parry, John Ross, George Back, and Franklin himself had mapped much of that whole area excepting a number of short stretches. Filling in those gaps on the maps and sailing all the way through was Franklin’s mission and it seemed like a logical and doable next step. Just before their departure, the assistant surgeon on the Erebus wrote to his brother that they fully expected to be in the Pacific by the end of the following summer, and the Admiralty was equally optimistic.
What no one knew was that it would have to be an exceptional summer indeed for the ice to clear sufficiently to be passable, and that Franklin was heading into the worst accumulation of multi-year ice in many years.
I agree that by 1845 navigation was pretty under control. They generally knew where they were (lat/long-wise), the problem is that they didn’t know where anything else was (i.e. where the actual coast of Canada was).
A map would have been much much much more useful than a magic lat-long locator.
And, in this case, it’s a weird counterfactual, because if Franklin had a good map, he never would have set out (“Oh, so there isn’t a NW passage. I see. And now there’s no point in just generally mapping the area, since I’ve got this map now. Well, I guess I’ll get some more gardening in, then.”)
This question rather reminds me of the student who once asked me why Darwin could not simply have proved the truth of evolution by DNA analysis.
Even then, the GPS satellite constellation requires a lot of maintenance. A world-wide network of tracking stations collects data that is crunched daily to provide updated ephemeris which is then uploaded to the satellites. Satellites age and drift, they are moved in and out of orbital slots and are sometimes replaced. I’m sure Sir John Franklin would have thought it more work than worthwhile.
Actually, a great deal of the Canadian Arctic archipelago had been mapped by Franklin’s time, and of course, the Northwest Passage most certainly exists. The main problem was sea ice.
Also, because GPS functionality is critically time dependent, the results would be grossly inaccurate without compensation for the relativistic effects of velocity and gravity. Since relativity hadn’t been discovered yet, Franklin would have been SOL on that score, too. 
The problem was lack of knowledge, but not one that would have been solved with a GPS.
They lacked knowledge of ice and they lacked knowledge of how to live on the land.
They assumed that ice would thaw each season. That was a big mistake which was repeated in various arctic expeditions. They were reasonably prepared to winter-over repeatedly, but they were not prepared to winter-over indefinitely, let alone extract without a ship.
Knowledge of the annual ice patterns learned over many years of ice mapping would have helped arctic expeditions make better decisions so as to try to avoid being trapped in multi-year ice. The First Polar Year in 1882 was a big step in this direction, however, it too fell into the trap of icing-over without understanding how ice would prevent extraction (e.g. Greely). It wasn’t until post-WWII that ongoing ice mapping by bomber (e.g. my uncle Gordie) combined with global meteorological data led to the ability to plot and eventually predict ice movement. Realistically, the first ice mapping that could have helped Franklin pick a better route didn’t exist until slightly over a hundred years after his expedition botched it.
Knowledge of how to live on the land would have been greatly valuable for extraction. There were already people up that way – people who observed the Franklin expedition, including it being trapped in the ice, and including the crews trying to walk their way south. The expedition would have had a better shot at extraction if there had not been so darn many of them (it was a famine year for the people who already lived there), and if they had previously learned how to live on the land, particularly regarding hunting, fishing, and clothes making (note that there were sightings of survivors moving south for up to a decade). For example, compare what the Franklin Expedition did not do with what Roald Amundsen did do while stranded on King William Island. In short, Amundsen (the first to successfully cross the Northwest Passage) went with a much smaller complement and spent his time when icebound in learning how to live off and travel over the land from the people who already lived there. In a later winter-over toward the end of his crossing of the NWP, had no difficulty in making his way overland to send a telegram – a 1600 km return trip).
To put this in perspective, ask why it is that Amundsen comfortably made a 1600 km journey during one of his winters-over basically for something interesting to do, whereas the remainder of the Franklin crews desperately tried to save themselves by walking out while hauling whaleboats loaded with solid oak planks, silverware, carpet slippers, and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. The short answer is that Amundsen learned to live in the arctic, whereas the Franklin crews continued to live in the United Kingdom despite being in the Arctic. No GPS could have helped them.