The Riddell of Beechey Island

Detail of a scrap of brown paper with "Lieut. C.B." written on it.

When searchers from Captain William Penny’s ships stumbled across the Franklin Expedition’s Winter Quarters on Beechey Island on 27th August 1850, their first priority was to find official papers that would tell them where to look next.

They did not find any. 

But they did find more than a dozen handwritten and printed fragments of paper in and among the remnants of the camp’s structures.

At the time, the searchers may have viewed these scraps of paper as worthless detritus. After all, this expedition was in the Arctic looking for living men.

Lost friends

They were searching for lost friends and colleagues. One man – Robert Anstruther Goodsir – was looking for a missing brother. Another, James Reid Junior, was searching for his missing father – the Ice Master of HMS Erebus.

A newspaper etching of a middle-aged man with mutton-chops and a hat with a shiny brim. He has a kind face.
Detail of an etching of Ice Master James Reid of HMS Erebus. (Alison’s collection)

And yet the searchers carefully gathered each scrap of paper, and brought them back to Britain the following year. 

The Lords of the Admiralty examined them. John Barrow Junior took custody of the papers in due course, and he dutifully pasted each one into a record book. 

These were early days in the search for the Franklin Expedition. None of the searchers had any idea that another eight years would pass before the only substantive piece of written evidence – the Victory Point Record – would be found on King William Island.

Scraps and clues

These Beechey Papers were just scraps. But sometimes even a scrap can contain clues to guide a theory of what it was – and how it got there.

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A Franklin Expedition guide to Edinburgh

Detail of the monument to John Irving in Dean Cemetery

This Edinburgh guide is the fourth in an ongoing series of UK Franklin Expedition touring guides written in partnership with Logan Zachary of Illuminator dot blog.

Many of the men lost on the Franklin Expedition of 1845 – or who went in search of it – were from Scotland. Some had close ties to Edinburgh, the country’s capital city. They had been born there, had qualified in medicine there, lived there. Some of their papers are in archives there.

And Edinburgh boasts the only known burial place of a Franklin Expedition sailor outside the Arctic, and outside London.

Lieutenant John Irving of HMS Terror was born at 106 Princes Street, Edinburgh, in 1815. He died, along with 128 others, somewhere in the Canadian Arctic. But bones believed to be his were returned to Edinburgh in 1880, and reburied in the city in 1881.

Only two of Franklin’s men came home. One of them is in Dean Cemetery.

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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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Jane and Amélie: a portrait of two ladies

A composite image of two young women with soft curls. Both were drawn by Swiss artist Amelie Romilly in the early 19th Century. One is a portrait of Jane Griffin, the other a self-portrait.
Portrait of Jane Griffin by Amélie Romilly (1816), and a contemporary self-portrait by Amélie.

It was the scene of 24-year-old Jane Griffin’s first romance, and the occasion of her first extended trip outside England. It was exhilarating and stressful, not least because all of these new experiences had to be navigated in a second language. All she wanted to do was be left alone to read Byron and Goethe.

But then she met someone new.

This wasn’t a romance: it would prove to be much more important than that.

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