The Franklin Relics in the Arctic Archive

Abstract

In August 2013 the Canadian governmentlaunched its largest search for the ships, relics, and records of the John Franklin expedition, which disappeared with all 129 hands lost searching for the Northwest Passage in 1845. Canada's latest search was its fifth in six years, one of dozens of search expeditions launched since 1848, in a well-known story of imperial hubris elevated to an internationalcause célèbre. Recent work in nineteenth-century literary and visual culture has shown the significant role that Franklin played in the Victorian popular imagination of the Arctic (see Spufford, Potter, David, Hill, Cavell, Williams, Savours, MacLaren). In panoramas, stereographs, paintings, plays, music, lantern shows, exhibitions, and popular and elite printed texts, record numbers of Britons could enjoy at their leisure the Arctic sublime in which Franklin's men perished. Alongside this work on how Europeans represented Arctic peoples and places, we also have a growing body of Inuit oral histories describing their encounters with nineteenth-century Arctic explorers. Drawing on these traditional histories of British exploration, visual culture, and literary imagination, and on postcolonial, anthropological and indigenous accounts that shift our attention away from the Eurocentrism of exploration historiography, and toward the “hidden histories of exploration,” this essay uncovers an unexamined material dimension of these encounters – the “Franklin Relics” collected by voyagers searching for Franklin.

From Death in the Ice to life in the museum: Absence, affect and mystery in the Arctic

“…That is, McClintock thought he was discerning enough to sense what Rae had only dimly witnessed. In 1859, his expedition found written notes in a cairn on King William Island, which established Franklin's death two years into the voyage (notably, this one-page document is the only written record from the expedition among numerous other objects; see Craciun (2014a)). In McClintock's published journal, dedicated to Jane Franklin, he wrote of this search for material evidence:…”

“…These items open up new mysteries just when science seemed to be answering them all. Many bodies and logbooks remain absent (see Craciun, 2014a). What stories would they tell?…”

“…Additionally, it will be altered because the subjectivities which remember, the groups and roles and the perspectives they represent, are not the same anymore. (Felder et al, 2015: 464) For instance, Warrior (2012) notes that the National Maritime Museum's Arctic collections contain artefacts, formerly owned by Admiral Sir George Back, which have variously been understood as personal relics of the explorer and as ethnographic artefacts that speak to the fur-trade society with which explorers made contact (see also Craciun, 2014a;Warrior, 2013). That is, objects themselves are re-constituted in different contexts to serve various ends within the politics of the museum itself.…”

Ghosts in the archive: the textual lacunæ of the Third Franklin Expedition

“…Indeed, he insists on these marginalia as a departure from the "formality" of the document. Craciun (2014Craciun ( , 2016 uses the theories and methods of the history of the book to understand repetitive tropes and preoccupations in narratives of Arctic exploration. Her treatment of the Third Franklin Expedition situates the Victory Point Record and, significantly, any of the writings the expedition officers would have been expected to produce, within a larger context of authorship and publication within 19th-century Admiralty culture.…”