Unfortunately, I missed most of the NOVA show on about the Franklin expedition disaster. I recall that one explanation for the bizarre behaviour of the men in this expedition, was lead poisoning leading to mental illness. Supposedly, the men ingested large doses of lead from improperly canned food. Has this been proven? Its hard to explain why the survivors tried to drag loaded wooden boats across the ice. Wouldn’t have made more sense to abandon everything excpet food, and strike out south? If reasonably fit men could make 20 miles a day, they could have reached the northern forests in 2-3 months, where they stood a chance of finding some food (game). Or were they simply too debilitated by the second winter, to have made it very far?
Oddly enough, the men never seemed to earn to hunt like the Inuit (spear seals and walrus).
According to the researchers on NOVA, the lead poisoning was from the solder that was used to seal the tin cans. The autopsy work done on the bodies found elevated lead levels in the bones. The findings indicated that the ingestion of lead had been recent, not from possible enviromental factors in London. In additon, they said that when the lead found in the bones was analyzed, it was the same as the solder residue found on the discarded tin cans. Here’s a snippet from the NOVA website:
In so far as any issue can reach a consensus in archaeology, pretty much yes.
One initial objection to the lead theory was the suggestion that the sailors had accumulated their exposure to it in growing up. The follow-up 1990 Nature paper by Kowal, Beattie, Baadsgaard and Krahn addressed this by analysing the separate isotopes of lead in samples from the bodies, the can solder and various comparison bones. They found that, in general, the ratios of the different isotopes were different depending on where and when the bone came from. Those from the Franklin expedition sailors however had ratios that strongly clustered around those from the solder. Since the wider pattern suggested that there was no reason why a disparate bunch of Victorian sailors of different ages and growing up in different locations should have similar isotope ratios, the inference was that this lead in their bones was coming from the cans. Presumably the manufacturer was sourcing his lead from a single location, which happened to have this particular (otherwise unremarkable) combination of isotopes.
This more recent paper (a pdf) further analysed and examined the samples and so discusses some of the issues involved.
Somewhat less technical, but highly readable and co-authored by the lead explanation’s originator, is Owen Beattie and John Geiger’s Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition. Originally published in 1987, there’s a revised 2004 edition that updates on these more recent findings and is also fronted with an introduction by Margaret Atwood. Recommended.
It would have made more sense if they had taken only food, but even that would have required a large boat. They did take the strangest things though – like polish for their buttons!
The lead wasn’t the only problem. The ice that trapped them didn’t thaw during the summer when it normally would have. After a year or two, the lemon juice they carried failed in its ability to prevent scurvy.
If you get another chance to see it, the program is well worth the time. It unfolds like a good mystery.
I guess i don’t understand what was on the mind of whoever commanded this disaster/expedition. After the first winter, it was pretty obvious that the NW passage wasn’t going to be found. They should have sent some scouts out to find a way south…waiting for another winter wasn’t a good idea. Incidentally, was Franklin a topnotch officer, or a plodding duffer facing retirement? of course, Aretic expeditions many times ended in tragedy-look at the greeley expedition-most of that crew persihed due to starvation.
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About 12 years ago or so there was a Nova about the exuming and autopsying of two artic explorers’ bodies. Were these from the Franklin Expedition?
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Franklin was indeed a good officer. They had planned on maybe waiting a couple of winters, they had so much (albeit poisonous) canned food. Nova makes the point that British explorers up till then felt nature was to be subjegated by them, not the other way round. This is why they had so many rather superfluous items with them (crystal glasses, fine china etc.)
They also make the point that this is why, when their ala carté technology failed them, they all simply starved & froze. The second half of it showed how Amundson did completely the opposite. He used a small ship & crew and spent years learning all he could from the Inuit before pressing on.
Worth noting that some of them seem to have tried to do just that.
Certainly some of them made it off King William Island, since skeletal remains of a few of the sailors have been found along the southern side of the strait separating it from the mainland. This is quite a bit further on from where most of the remains and artefacts have been found.
Reconstructing the sequence of events in the latter stages of their predicament is necessarily speculative, but it’s plausible that, once the fruitlessness and death toll of trying to drag laiden boats had been realised, the hardier of the survivors left the others in an attempt to walk south with just what they could carry. They then only got a hundred miles or so before starving to death.
That assumes that this is in the late stages, when even those in best condition would have been pretty debilitated by their ordeal. Whether they could ever had made it out by starting walking much earlier, I don’t know. The rescue expeditions saw multiple cases of endurance involving small parties of their contemporaries surviving in extreme circumstances in the area, but I don’t think any of their escapes quite compare to what would have been required for any of the original crew to have walked to safety.
I don’t think 20 miles a day in a artic wasteland is a practical number given that:
1 - they didn’t have modern gear
2 - They didn’t even have non-modern gear for that task (to set off on foot) and they would have to cobble things together on site, which would be heavier and bulkier then actually needed.
3 - They would have to carry 2-3 months min. of food.
4 - They would need some sort of snowshoes, which would further slow them.
I would say they would be lucky to get an average of 10 m/d instead of 20, whch would require 2x the amount of food, which would slow them down even more.
I just read a good book “ICEBLINK” about this topic. It seems that the expedition was done in by the canned food-it sounds unbelievable, but the workmen actually added arsenic to the solder to help it flow better! In addition to this, there is evidence that the food was canned improperly-botulism spores were present in the food, and the packing process was not hot enough to destroy them. That explains why sailors and officers were dying during the first winter.
Seriously though, the Expedition seems to have had poor leadership-after the second winter, they should have left as fast as possible. Franklin had mapped the canadian artic coast, so they had some idea of how to go-dragging those heavy boats was not the way to escape.