Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony

James Pritchard is a history professor at Queen’s University.

The disappearance of Sir John Franklin’s expedition while searching
for the Northwest Passage has given rise to a virtual library of books
and articles that seek to answer the mystery surrounding the
explorers’ fate. This new volume is a significant contribution to that
collection.

According to all other accounts, Franklin and those under his command
were last seen on July 28, 1845, when the Erebus and the Terror sailed
into the ice-pack in Davis Straight; they were never seen again. Woodman
challenges this view head-on. They were seen by Inuit, and the evidence
of the sightings is locked in the collective memory of the Native people
and recorded by later Franklin searchers.

Arguing from the premise that the Native evidence contains truthful
accounts and that confusion arises from their interpretation, not from
deliberate distortions or lies, Woodman has brought together all the
Inuit accounts recorded by later searchers (some never before published)
and subjected the accounts to detailed cross-examination. The Inuit were
intelligent, truthful, and, as befits a people living in a featureless
land, amazingly observant. The author slowly builds his case for
rewriting the Franklin saga by arranging their testimony as in a court
proceeding, with the reader as judge. The argument that emerges is very
complicated, multifaceted, and admittedly incomplete. It is also so
original that it is bound to arouse controversy among those who love
forensic puzzles.

This argument rejects the commonly accepted interpretations that
Franklin’s two vessels were lost together, that Captain Crozier led
105 survivors south in a futile search for the mainland, that the last
of these died in 1848, and that many died from lead poisoning owing to
improper food-canning technology. The author sets out no fewer than 21
particulars (including some survivors being alive as late as 1851) in
which his reconstruction differs from the common version. This is a
splendid study whose substance is presented in a stimulating and
challenging manner. Woodman has no doubt that one or both of the wrecked
ships will eventually be found or that “somewhere, probably ten feet
from the remains of a once prominent marker, a Franklin record [is] . .
. buried in the permafrost.” Until then his book will be “must”
reading for all those fascinated by the story of Arctic exploration.