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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“Carried for long, or to the last” – Franklin relics and the Goodsir family

I have the strongest impression, that the Student’s Manual spoken of in the Illustrated London News as among the Franklin Relics, had belonged to poor Harry.”
Jane Ross Goodsir, 1854

We know what the Franklin Relics looked like – chronometers, cap bands, cutlery that passed through many hands.

But what was it like for the families of the missing men of the Franklin Expedition, to open a newspaper and read about a relic that had belonged to someone you love?

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Easy money: the theft of Franklin relics in 1878

Nobody noticed the break-in at first. But when the cleaners came in to dust the room and they realised that some priceless relics were no longer in their display case, the museum staff went into a frenzy.

It was 23rd October 1878 at the Royal Naval Museum in Greenwich, and some of the Franklin relics were missing.

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