IT HAS been called "the most extensive, the most expensive, perverse and ill-starred, and the most abundantly written about man-hunt in history".
Between 1847 and 1857 no fewer than 39 expeditions set forth from both Britain and the United States to scour the icy waters to the north of Canada in the hope of finding some traces of the explorer, Sir John Franklin. He had sailed from the Thames Estuary in May 1845 hoping to find the elusive North-West Passage, and after his disappearance the search for him assumed even greater proportions than that for the Holy Grail that he himself pursued.
The North-West Passage was a sea route that had long been presumed to exist from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific around the north of Canada, and which conjured up the enticing prospect of profitably shuttling goods from Sheerness to Shanghai without the need to venture around the Cape. Countless adventurers had tried to find it, starting with Martin Frobisher and Sabastian Cabot in the 16th century.
Franklin had made two previous attempts to discover the passage before his departure in 1845 in command of two ships, Erebus and Terror. The vessels spent the winter of 1845-46 near Beechey Island, were sighted some time later in Baffin Bay, but after that - just nothing. When, in 1847, Franklin's return was overdue, the search for him began in earnest, much of it co-ordinated by none other than Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, who, years earlier, had devised the Beaufort scale of wind force.
For Beaufort the operation became "a sacred cause". "Where poor Franklin and his two ships may be," he wrote to his sister, Louisa, "or what may be his ultimate fate, no one can tell. That he and they may now be down under the ice is indeed possible, but there are no more grounds for asserting it than that he has been carried up like Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind. Further efforts, therefore, must be made in order to come to some decisive conclusion on this matter."
The fate of the explorer and his crew remained a mystery until June 1859, when along with a few items of personal belongings, a record of the last days of the expedition was found beneath a cairn on King Edward Island. Marooned in the ice for months, the officers and men had abandoned their ships in 1848, and tried unsuccessfully to trek across the ice to civilisation; none survived. And Franklin himself? He had died aboard his flagship, apparently of natural causes, on June 11th, 1847, 150 years ago today.