illuminator newsletter #32
DIVE SEASON APPROACHING
11 August 2024.
Parks Canada’s research vessel, R.V. David Thompson, has entered the Atlantic and turned north. She’s currently running a few days ahead of the 2022 and 2023 seasons, due to stop at Nain, Labrador on Tuesday. Gauging by previous seasons, she could reach the Erebus & Terror wreck sites in about two weeks.
SINCE THE LAST ISSUE
Still no word on who won the Franklin Expedition daguerreotypes set from Sotheby’s in September 2023. With nearly a year of silence, it seems highly unlikely that any public institution won the auction.
Also no word on when the Erebus shipwreck artifacts from Parks Canada will go on display in Portsmouth/Belfast/Hartlepool (nor which city will be first). News on this is expected before the end of 2024, according to the museum (N.M.R.N.).
6 March 2024.
Mystery Object. By Ratcliffe/Hackmann.
Parks Canada’s John Ratcliffe has approached the Scientific Instrument Society to help identify the mystery instrument from HMS Erebus. The highest resolution photographs yet released of the instrument appear in the society’s Bulletin #160, accompanied by a one-page article. The strange object was recovered very close to falling off the stern of HMS Erebus in 2015, at the captain’s cabin.
https://scientificinstrumentsociety.org/bulletin-160-march-2024/
Subscription required. The article can otherwise be viewed by members of the Franklin Expedition Facebook group, free to join, courtesy of Russell Potter:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/11434844549/posts/10161013097854550/
1 May 2024.
The Missing Planks. By Dave Woodman.
New article from Dave Woodman. I’ve read many attempts at explaining the Inuit testimony regarding the drilling of a hole into one of the ships, apparently causing her to sink. It’s been suggested they may merely have broken a window at the stern, etc. Woodman has here laid out a new theory: that that particular story may have referred to a boat, not a ship. In addition to presenting corroborating Inuit testimony, Woodman makes the point that native English speakers regularly conflate the terms “ship” and “boat.”
https://www.aglooka.ca/missing-planks/
7 April 2024.
Vault 61. By Zachary & Freebairn.
Alison Freebairn and I have released new photography of Jane Franklin’s final resting place in the catacombs of Kensal Green Cemetery, London. This is the first visit in over a decade, as the Anglican chapel’s catacomb has been closed for many years.
https://www.illuminator.blog/p/jane-catacomb.html
18 June 2024.
New Insights into William Gibson, Thomas Armitage, and the “Peglar Papers” of the Franklin Expedition. By Glenn M. Stein.
Regarding the ‘Peglar’ mystery, Glenn Marty Stein has a new article in Arctic, following up on his 2007 assessment (link) that the ‘Peglar’ skeleton may have belonged to Terror’s steward William Gibson. Having made contact with Gibson family descendants, Stein has now been able to add a wealth of personal details — e.g., that the Gibson family believed that William acted as John Franklin’s musician.
Few bones or bodies have ever been found from the Franklin Expedition, and fewer still have ever been identified. With Doug Stenton’s team recently using DNA to identify the bones of the Erebus’ engineer John Gregory at the Boat Place (2021), and with Stenton’s rediscovery of the lost ‘Peglar’ grave site (2022), the solution to the identity of the ‘Peglar’ bones may soon be unravelled. If Glenn Marty Stein’s theory is proved correct, he will have done so by overturning the work of such Franklin luminaries as F. Leopold McClintock, A.G.E. Jones, and Richard J. Cyriax.
https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/arctic/article/view/79503
(Link to page with new article available as a PDF download. The PDF is also available on Stein’s website, glennmstein.com).
4 June 2024.
“A romance based on information”: The curious case of Clements Markham’s Franklin Expedition novel. By Allegra Rosenberg.
Allegra Rosenberg (Director of Terror Camp) has an article in Polar Record taking the first holistic look at one of the strangest sources of Franklin Expedition details: Clements Markham’s never-published 1899 fictional history of the Franklin Expedition, centered on James Fitzjames.
16 March 2024 / 1 August 2024.
Allegra Rosenberg also spotted an expedition letter by HMS Erebus’ surgeon Stephen Stanley – written onboard ship, not previously cataloged in May We Be Spared – in the New York Public Library’s recent exhibition The Awe of the Arctic.
Author Anne Strathie located the high resolution photography of the letter on the library’s website:
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/06bcfca0-2e4e-013c-e64b-0242ac110003
Stanley’s career was recently expanded upon by Michael Tracy and Russell Potter in a new article on Visions of the North (1 August 2024):
https://visionsnorth.blogspot.com/2024/08/new-details-on-career-of-stephen-samuel.html
Also, I want to spotlight that in the run-up to the above exhibition, the New York Public Library quietly digitized their copies of the three color plate books from the Franklin Searches: May, Cresswell, and Browne. As Russell Potter recently commented regarding the Cresswell set: without these plates, “there would be at least two dozen books with blank covers.” Few institutions hold copies of these rarities, and purchasing originals of all three sets from Aquila Books in Calgary would run upwards of US$70,000. The NYPL now lists these images as “Free to use without restriction”, and is offering them at resolution sizes (surpassing 8,000px width) that previously only my own website offered Franklin imagery at.
The painstaking detail that these artworks were created at has never been seen before online. Concurrent with Sotheby’s digitization of the Franklin daguerreotypes, the New York Public Library helped make 2023 something of a dam-break year in terms of democratizing access to the visual history of the Franklin Expedition.
Links, with a detail view from each set:
The Cresswell set (link), from McClure’s search. [This detail above comes from “Critical Position of H.M.S. Investigator,” probably the most well-known image from the entire Northwest Passage saga.]
The May set (link), from the Belcher search — with its final page sketching Rae’s new Franklin relics, including a disintegrating chronometer.
The Browne set (link), from James Clark Ross’ search.
April 21 2024.
A portrait by Richard Westall of the poet Eleanor Porden. By Barbara Bryant.
The previous issue of this newsletter (#31) displayed the portrait of Franklin’s first wife Eleanor Anne Porden. Shortly afterward, an article in The Burlington Magazine reattributed the painter of the portrait from Mary Ann Flaxman to Richard Westall. [Subscription required.]
https://twitter.com/BurlingtonMag/status/1780507928874623109