Category: Edward Augustus Inglefield

Through a land so wild: A Franklin Expedition guide to Kensal Green Cemetery

Cemetery map.
Our new map of the North-West Passage graves in Kensal Green Cemetery. Please click for full resolution. Image: Logan Zachary/illuminator dot blog

If you want to pay your respects to the people who searched for a North-West Passage – or who organised or participated in efforts to find the Franklin Expedition – you should visit Kensal Green Cemetery in West London.

This cemetery guide is a collaboration with Logan Zachary of illuminator dot blog. Alison Freebairn wrote the biographies. The map, grave coordinates, and the vast majority of the original photography are Logan Zachary’s work.

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Alison Freebairn1 Comment

Communication channels: how one little search note found its way home

A detail of a 1850 search note left by Captain Erasmus Ommanney of HMS Assistance. Copyright: The National Archives.
A detail of a 1850 search note left on Cape Warrender by Captain Erasmus Ommanney of HMS Assistance. © The National Archives. Editing: Logan Zachary.

They were cold, they were tired, and they had just torn down a large stone cairn on a freezing Arctic headland and found it empty. This is where Sir John Franklin’s men should have left a written record of where they had gone next. To find Erebus and Terror, the searchers had first to find a note.

But there was something even worse than finding nothing in the cairn.

It was finding a cylinder in the cairn, frantically opening it, unrolling the note with shaking hands and hammering heart, and finding it was a missive from another Franklin searcher – possibly even from someone on your own expedition.

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