Franklin expedition

The Franklin expedition was a failed attempt by the Royal Navy to chart the remaining undiscovered section of the Northwest Passage. The expedition, initially consisting of 133 men on board the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, departed from Greenhithe, England in 1845 under the command of Sir John Franklin and was last seen by European whalers waiting in Baffin Bay for good conditions to enter the waters of northern Canada.

In September 1846, the two ships became trapped in ice off of the western shore of King William Island. When the ice failed to thaw in 1847, the expedition, then under the command of Captain Francis Crozier following Franklin's death, abandoned the ships in April 1848 and began walking to Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake, an 800-mile journey. The surviving men gradually succumbed to malnutrition, scurvy and cannibalism, in addition to attacks by a creature known as Tuunbaq. By 1850, Crozier was the only known survivor of the expedition.

The failure of the expedition was the result of numerous factors. Poor command decisions by Franklin, along with his refusal to preemptively establish an adequate rescue plan, left the expedition without a realistic means of securing aid once the ships became trapped. Though the ships were supposedly provisioned for up to five years, poor canning techniques by the supplier resulted in many of the ship's tinned foods becoming spoiled, while lead contamination from the soldering process gradually poisoned the crew. Finally, attacks by Tuunbaq resulted in the loss of men and sowed panic and division among the survivors.

Ironically, the expedition achieved its primary goal when Thomas Blanky inadvertently discovered the Northwest Passage while traversing King William Island, though his subsequent death prevented him from sharing this discovery.