On this day in 1845 an expedition under Sir John Franklin sailed down the River Thames bound for the icy wastes of the Arctic ocean. This was not Franklin's first trip to the Arctic. In 1819 he lead an expedition mapping another part of the mythical northwest passage along the northern coast of Canada. It was a disaster. Their supplies ran out and they found that there was not enough game to hunt in order to restock. Eleven of the party of 20 died with the remainder becoming so hungry they eat anything they could get their hands on, lichen from trees, their own boots, even their dead colleagues. That really should have been a hint that Arctic exploration was not Franklin's forte. However back in the warmth of the clubs where British the establishment gathered instead of a pitiful failure his story became one of a plucky adventurer battling the elements, he was even promoted.
The 1845 trip was much better equipped than his 1819 attempt with two ships (HMS Terror and HMS Erebus), more men, and enough food that it should have lasted them three years. However just as before the expedition was a disaster, but this time nobody survived. The ships were trapped in the ice and their supplies began to run low. The canned food that they had should have been enough for several years, but there was a problem with the canning process meaning that while the food was kept fresh lead from the solder used to seal the cans leached out into it slowly poisoning everybody that ate it.
Nobody really knows what finally happened in the end. In the end scurvy, cold, pneumonia, as well as the lead probably killed everybody. There were no survivors, and of the dead only an handful of bodies were ever found. Amongst those bodies that were found there was evidence of cannibalism, like on his first expedition. Further expeditions were sent to find Franklin and his men, resulting in even more deaths until the number of people killed on the rescue missions was even more than the number killed on the original one.
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