illuminator newsletter #37
Upcoming: new Franklin documentary.
Upcoming: book launch in Ottawa.
Still awaiting news on dive season 2024.
Upcoming: 3 February 2025.
This coming Monday, The History Channel show History’s Greatest Mysteries, hosted by actor Laurence Fishburne, will release an episode covering the Franklin Expedition. Professor Russell Potter has said that he was interviewed (link to post at RtFE), and hopefully his clips will have made their final cut.
Also, these TV documentaries can be sources of new Erebus & Terror imagery. This is true even when they’re not about Franklin: in November 2020, Russ Taichman spotted new Erebus footage in a Shackleton documentary, the footage only identified as “a northern Canadian wooden shipwreck” — and never since appearing anywhere else. Indeed, that documentary was from Season 1 of this same television series. Thus we know the producers already have rare Erebus wreck footage in their possession. [Presumably they’d intended to do a Franklin episode since that first season.]
Airtime is 9pm Eastern/8pm Central, and then will be available for streaming the next day.
https://play.history.com/shows/historys-greatest-mysteries
Upcoming: 19 February 2025.
In Ottawa this month, there will be a book launch event for The Land Was Always Used: An Inuit Oral History of the Franklin Expedition. Speakers will be Edna Ekhivalak Elias (lead interviewer) and Connie Wren-Gunn (lead author). The book will be on sale at the event — making this quite possibly the fastest way to get ahold of a copy.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/book-launch-the-land-was-always-used-tickets-1230436361279
At The Arctic Book Review, Russell Potter has reviewed The Land Was Always Used.
https://arcticbookreview.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-land-was-always-used-inuit-oral.html
Russell Potter also shared the web address from which the book can be ordered. Prices and shipping details are not yet available; there is only a form to send contact information to the Nattilik Heritage Centre in Gjoa Haven.
https://www.thelandwasalwaysused.ca
Since the last issue.
7 December 2024.
At Terror Camp IV, actor Jared Harris shared the news that there has been planning around a potential “Terror-curated” Northwest Passage cruise, hosted by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. The voyage would aim to include members of the cast and crew, showrunner David Kajganich, and author Michael Palin, giving talks along the way and visiting sites from the expedition. Harris believed the plan had been to sail in 2024, but that that date has now been pushed back to 2025 or even later. [For anyone unfamiliar with these Northwest Passage cruises, I would suggest that the ticket price for such a trip would likely be north of US$20,000 per person.]
Terror Camp IV also got a very nice write-up by Simone de Rochefort at Polygon. Over 1,800 people signed up to attend this year, continuing the conference’s upward trend.
https://www.polygon.com/culture/500922/the-terror-amc-terror-camp
2 January 2025.
The year 2024 has passed without the debut of the Erebus shipwreck artifacts at Britain’s National Museum of the Royal Navy. The original 2023 press release from the museum had forecasted a tour that same year of three NMRN sites — Portsmouth, Belfast, and Hartlepool — along with their recently-acquired Kellett search flag. With this long of a delay, it’s now questionable whether that tour plan is still intended, and 2026 now seems as likely as 2025 for the artifacts’ eventual debut.
Nonetheless, Russell Potter spotted a recent press release (link) revealing that the museum has indeed received shipwreck artifacts such as the Erebus bell and Erebus wheel, as far back as March of 2024 (link). None of these artifacts have been seen in public since the exhibition Death In The Ice closed in 2019, prior to the pandemic.
Late 2024.
In February of 2023, Jillian Price spotted a portrait photograph at auction on eBay (above, right) of an unidentified Franklin searcher. The caption read: “1850. FATHER on board H.M.S NORTH STAR. on inspection by the Admiralty before leaving in search for Sir John Franklin in the Arctic Regions.” A number of people – I recall Edmund Wuyts and Alison Freebairn – immediately noted the facial resemblance to the Pullen brothers, from their Franklin searcher portraits published in the Illustrated London News during 1852.
Just recently, a Pullen family descendant, William Pullen of Nova Scotia, shared with Alison Freebairn and I his own matching family photograph (above, left). That a Pullen family descendant holds such a photograph definitively settles that the sitter is indeed one of the Royal Navy Pullens. Though unnamed, the sitter most resembles Thomas Charles Pullen in the 1852 ILN sketches (which are themselves drawn from photographs).
Assuming the written date “1850” is too early, the ship “North Star” may yet be right: this may be one of the lost portraits taken by Leopold McClintock on the deck of HMS North Star in 1854, while lying off Beechey Island at the end of the Belcher search (see Wamsley & Barr 1996 in Polar Record, “Early photographers of the Arctic”). None of McClintock’s Beechey Island portrait photographs have ever been identified.
Family descendant William Pullen has himself written biographical sketches of both of the Pullen brothers who searched for Franklin, and he donated their Arctic Medals to the Naval Museum of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was also able to inform us that Thomas Charles Pullen’s original Franklin search journal (available in typed transcript at institutions such as SPRI) was presumably destroyed at the family home in Plymouth during the Blitz, ending our search for the original manuscript.
12 January 2025.
For those intending to visit Greenwich, Fitzjames researcher Fabiënne Tetteroo has spotted that the cup awarded to James Fitzjames for saving a man from drowning in the Mersey is now on display in the museum’s Voyagers gallery (link to Tetteroo’s new photography). Tetteroo’s website publishes Fitzjames’ own account of his action along with other contemporary accounts (link). The Voyagers gallery is on the ground floor near the park entrance, across from the cafe; I’ve added a note about this new display to the Franklin Expedition guide to Greenwich’s Polar Worlds (link).
11 December 2024.
New transcriptions of the Beechey Island gravemarkers. By Logan Zachary & Alison Freebairn.
Alison Freebairn and I have completed our project to pin down the original gravemarker inscriptions from Beechey Island. A few highlights from the final installment are excerpted here.
https://www.illuminator.blog/p/gravemarkers2.html
Last Word.
I’ve found it hard to fathom that news of the discovery of both James Fitzjames and Sandy Irvine occurred in the year 2024, and that their stories broke just two weeks apart. Had anyone predicted this, they would have been considered mad. Two men who might never be found again, reappearing almost simultaneously, a century and more after their respective disappearances.
Six months til dive season 2025.