I was reading about the lost Franklin expedition. Apparently the search for the NW passage was driven by a desire to find a trade route with Asia.
But, as I read it, Franklin’s ship were loaded with provisions for 3 or 4 years - for 129 men! - because they anticipated wintering over for those years on their journey. So 3 years over and 3 years back for a total of 6 years for an out and back trip. Given the time and cost, would it really been cost effective to trade with Asia under those restrictions? I’m wondering if English pride was the motivating factor instead.
I’m very interested in the Franklin expedition and years ago read a fascinating book (Frozen in Time) about what happened to them and why, but that dealt more with their journey and ultimate fate rather than the hoped-for goal of finding a Northwest Passage. What I can tell you, though, is that the multiple years had little to do with the length of the journey and mostly to do with the difficult hit-and-miss process of discovering the hoped-for route. They departed in May, 1845 and arrived in Baffin Bay only a few months later (or sooner); the last Europeans to have reported seeing them did so in August of that same year. This was a time when sailing ships were beginning to transition to steam and Franklin’s ships had both means of propulsion, so transit time through the NW passage to Asia would not have been all that onerous had an actual feasible route existed. And planners probably foresaw a future when steam engines alone would make it faster still.
Yep, this. They knew it would take a long time to find the route just because they would have to do a lot of trial and error and backtracking. Then they would have to figure out when the northern ice would be cooperative and would open up various passageways. Once they knew the route and knew when the ice would open up, trade ships could then schedule their routes to go through quickly.
Keep in mind that the Panama Canal hadn’t been built yet. The alternative was to sail all the way around the bottom of South America. If they could find a working route through the northern ice, they could have cut thousands of miles off of their journey.
Unfortunately for them, the ice isn’t that cooperative.
However, with climate change being what it is, the Northwest Passage is becoming viable for shipping, to some degree. While ice often blocks the routes completely, many passages are staying open for at least part of the year. Unfortunately for the shipping industry, those passages still have a lot of dangerous floating ice, so it’s still not all that good of a route. While the melting arctic ice might be bad for other parts of the world, if the current trend continues, decent ice-free shipping lanes could soon become common through the arctic, and modern shipping could finally get their long awaited shortcut to Asia.
Just a quick note to say that my mention of Frozen in Time refers to the book by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, not to be confused by the apparently more popular one by Mitchell Zuckoff about World War II.
The one about the Franklin expedition appears to be out of print in hardcopy and available in the Kindle version only from Amazon Canada.
I found it fascinating for the reconstruction of the terrible ordeal that the sailors went through after becoming stuck in the ice in the far Arctic. There were many deaths even before they finally had to abandon ship and try trudging across the ice in the quest for any form of civilization. None of them survived. Eventually some scattered remains were found, with some of the bones suggesting that in the final days they had resorted to cannibalism – a fact that Charles Dickens (among other notables) vehemently rejected as impossible for upstanding Christian British men.
One of the things that made it so eerie was the discovery in recent years of several graves where bodies of several of the sailors had been preserved in the permafrost and eventually exhumed and autopsied. This discovery was largely the basis of the book and its title. In addition to the horrors of the bitter cold and starvation, the autopsies showed that many of them suffered from extreme lead poisoning. This turned out to be due to defective lead sealing on the cans used for their large stores of canned food. The fact that lead poisoning leads to painful symptoms, mood disorders, paranoia, and eventually hallucinations – and seeing pictures of the preserved bodies from the mid-19th century that had endured all this – lends the whole story a horrifying other-worldly quality.
Since the publication of the book and its revised edition, both of the Franklin ships – the Erebus and the Terror – have been found in the waters of the high Arctic.
One of the many, many interesting aspects of this event is that one of the several expeditions sent in search of the Franklin expedition actually made the first successful crossing of the NW Passage. The McClure expedition came in from the west, but their ship the Investigator got iced in, just like the Franklin expedition. Sensibly McClure sent sledging parties out in several directions, and left messages with a clear indication of his position and status at each. One of the expeditions coming from the east found the cairn he left on Melville Island and came and rescued them by sledge. Thus the crew of the Investigator managed to join the Resolute in the east, becoming the first Westerners to cross the passage in either direction.
Sadly, one of the Investigator’s crew died on the way home, and was buried next to three of the first men to die from the Franklin expedition, on Beechey Island. After this ‘successful’ passage the powers that be seem to have abandoned the idea of this route for fifty years.
One of the many, many mysteries of the Franklin expedition is why he didn’t leave more message cairns; in fact only one has been found, with two very terse notes (one written in the margins of the other). Did they run out of paper?
I read Dan Simmons’ The Terror a few months ago, and liked it. It’s romanticised and includes supernatural elements, but it’s also a very good (imo) third-person-subjective depiction of life aboard such ships for a 21st-century audience, and it does try to match the few known facts about the expedition’s fate (though it was written before the wrecks were located). The book’s recently been made into a TV series on AMC, which I haven’t seen.
Forgot to add: The Terror doesn’t try to answer the OP’s question. The why is mostly seen in terms of one-upsmanship among the Navy’s high-ranking captains, and the general theme of the Empire using exploration to expand its territory, prosperity and prestige.
I would argue, in that case, that the novel actually does answer the OP’s question, and that by the mid-Nineteenth Century there was little to no hope of a commercially viable Northwest Passage. Captain Cook had covered the entire west coast of North America in the late 1700’s, proving that no passage emptied directly into the Pacific. The “passage” could only connect one part of the Arctic to another part of the Arctic, at extremely high latitudes. Any passage could only be open a few weeks out of the year, and then only under very variable and dangerous conditions. Granted, the trip around Cape Horn was no bargain, but by the 1840’s, the “Northwest Passage” was already pretty much guaranteed to be worse.
Just wanted to say thanks for the note about Dan Simmons’ The Terror, which I didn’t know about. I’ve read one or two of his books in the past and he seems to be a decent enough horror writer. So I just got it for the Kindle and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it, given my fascination with the topic.
Incidentally, in the preface material, he indicates that the last known sighting of the Franklin expedition was in Baffin Bay, as I had mentioned, but his sources give the date as late July 1845 rather than August, the sighting apparently made by whalers. For those not familiar, Baffin Bay is the part of the North Atlantic that separates Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic from the west coast of Greenland.
They were talking to a scientist involved with the artifacts retrieval from the HMS Erebus not too long ago and he stated the ice conditions in that area were the worst in 2 decades last summer/fall reducing their opportunity to work at the site to just a few days instead of the weeks they were expecting. The site were HMS Terror is located was even worse being completely inaccessible.
ETA: During the search for the Erebus and Terror, there were some issues in 2009 related to a shortage of ships and Coast Guard support and unusual sea ice, but that was an anomalous peak that only matched the ice level of five years previous, and the clear trend is very rapid average ice decline.
ECG’s comment was about the increasing viability of the NW Passage as a shipping route due to average annual declines in Arctic sea ice. Your response to that appeared to indicate that you disagree, but as I just showed you, that is exactly what’s happening. Whatever ice issues they’re talking about in that article related to accessing the Franklin wrecks, assuming it’s factually correct, were obviously extremely localized and not representative of the region overall, and therefore not representative either of the general region nor of the general trend in the opening up of the NW Passage. As a matter of fact, in August and September of 2018, when the article claims they were encountering ice conditions that were “the worst seen in 20 years”, Arctic sea ice extent was the 6th lowest in the 40-year satellite record.