“I am Lieutenant Pim of the Resolute.”
The Franklin searcher who found Robert McClure and HMS Investigator, shouting this line across the ice, is himself lost in a London cemetery. McClure happens to be buried in the same cemetery, but this time he’s not the one missing. Continue reading “Finding Pim in Kensal Green Cemetery”
One of the most annoying things in my life as a Robert Anstruther Goodsir researcher is the man’s infuriating reluctance to put his real name on many of the articles he wrote. But he’s out there if you know where and how to look.
Sophia Cracroft’s lost inscription at Kensal Green Cemetery. The late afternoon sun reveals the deeper holes that anchored the letters.
Continue reading “Sophia Cracroft’s lost inscription at Kensal Green Cemetery”
This could be John Barrow’s tombstone in St. Martin’s Garden. Continue reading “Possible John Barrow tombstone”
Alison arranged for me to be able to photograph the Victory Point Record in London on February 5th. Blowing up my photos, I can see a fingerprint at the bottom of the note.
Continue reading “A fingerprint on the Victory Point Record”
Copyright: The National Archives / Image: Logan Zachary
“They may be portions of one of Sir John Franklin’s ships. God grant that the crews are safe.”
Continue reading “John Rae’s sketch of possible Erebus or Terror ship part”
Logan followed a lead all the way to London, and made a fantastic breakthrough: https://twitter.com/LoganoZaccaria/status/1199626722204934144
The fingerpost found on Beechey Island was definitely at the former Royal United Services Museum for maybe two-thirds of the 20th Century. Logan thought he could see it in the photograph above, but how to prove it? Well, it involved a lot of hard work in the RUSI Library, which he detailed in a long post for the Remembering the Franklin Expedition history club over on Facebook.
The clincher jumped out at him, magic-eye style, after weeks of studying the photo. That’s the Beechey Island anvil, right next to the post.
Picture a Victorian graveyard, and you’re probably picturing something like this. It’s ornate, melodramatic, well-manicured, and photogenic. Large swathes of Kensal Green Cemetery are like this. But important parts of it aren’t.
Continue reading “Lost Arctic heroes located in Kensal Green Cemetery”
At 10am on Thursday 15 August 2019, I walked into The National Archives in Kew, London, to look for some missing journals. I didn’t find them. What I did find was the Beechey Papers, a collection of Franklin relics that were assumed to be lost.
I was astonished to find scraps of journals, newspapers and other fragments of printed and hand-written materials that were clearly marked as having been picked up where the crews of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror had spent the winter of 1845-1846.
Continue reading “Beechey Papers rediscovered in The National Archives”