Entrevue avec Andrew Lambert (en anglais)

Professor Andrew Lambert of King's College London, is a British naval historian and commentator for various British historical documentaries, whose book Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation was published in 2009.

Lyle Dick – Interview with Andrew Lambert, Professor at King’s College, London UK.

1) When and how did you first hear of the missing last expedition of Sir John Franklin?

AL: The Franklin story is part of the fundamental mythos of the Royal Navy, so if you’ve been reading naval history as long as I have- I was probably four or five when I came across Franklin. I’ve been a naval historian from the time I could read, so I’ve known about this for a very long time. But I’d never taken it seriously as a research subject, even though the nineteenth century is my area, until we had a meeting with a film producer and a director at Somerset House, right here at King’s College in 2004. They said, did I know about the expedition and I said yes- then they asked, was I going to come to the Arctic with them and film it and I said yes, when, and they said next week. So within the space of a week I went from knowing enough about this to write one side of a piece of paper to having read everything I could get my hands on and I was sitting on a plane heading for Gjoa Haven. So it went from being something in the background to being the foreground very very quickly.

LD: And the idea for the book, is that something that developed over time?

AL: The idea of the book came to me one night, although of course at that latitude in high summer “night” is a relative expression. We were up at Point Victory camped out on the beach where the Franklin survivors came ashore and the wind was blowing and it was- cold, in fact very cold. And I lay in my extra thick sleeping bag on top of an untreated muskox hide thinking: “what on earth am I doing in the most inhospitable of place on the face of the planet?” And I decided, to give myself some comfort I would think about writing a book about this. More in the way of explaining what lunatic I was than actually- But it became, as we trekked across the landscape and then back again to Gjoa Haven. It became increasingly important to understand just what brought the man here.

[Phone ringing, answer cut short. When back, move on to next question.]

2) What happened to Franklin's party?

AL: Franklin’s expedition reached their destination in the second year, after they’d sailed, they overwintered on Beechey Island, they sailed down Parry Sound turned into Peel Strait, and they reached very close to magnetic north. They then became stuck in the ice and the assumption they must have had was that the ice would open the following summer- it didn’t. So they were locked in the ice, traveling slowly southwards on drift until their supplies ran out and they decided to abandon ship. They then marched over land heading for the Great Fish River, and the nearest post which they might find some relief but this is a distance of over a thousand miles. They were never going to make that distance. These were men who were already suffering from scurvy. Three men had died in the first winter at Beechey Island essentially of tuberculosis. They had very little relative exercise so they wouldn’t have been particularly fit. And they needed to carry every last thing that they would need on that journey, all of their food, and probably quite a lot of fuel as well to cook it and even to melt down their water. When McClintock checked the boats and examined what could be carried in them he worked out that they had forty days supplies. And a recent documentary checked how far fit able men could pull these boats and they discovered the answer to that was less than ten miles a day. These men got as far as they could before their food ran out. And at that point, they resorted to cannibalism. And when that ran out, that was the end. It’s possible one or two of them made it to the mainland, at a place now called Starvation Cove, which proves that by then there were no officers left because they missed the entrance to the Great Fish River and were in fact in a dead end. So essentially by the time they got to the southwestern corner of King William Island at Erebus and then Terror Bay, the expedition had collapsed and men were left behind tending encampments where nobody survived. Those who were fit enough marched on until they too dropped. And towards the end, men were discovered who just literally died on their feet and fallen over flat on their faces.

LD: How long do you think they managed to survive or when do you suppose the last group of the Franklin party died?

AL: I don’t see a reason why we should suppose they lasted more than two months after they abandoned ship. Their food supply ran out in a little over a month, and the weather and the conditions were hardly going to produce any alternative food supplies. We know that they met a small Inuit hunting party but what little the hunting party was willing to exchange before they very wisely left wouldn’t have kept one man going for two days. So they simply had no possibility of making it out, and they were not equipped or experienced in surviving the local conditions. There were very few Europeans who were. And this expedition had not been sent out to make overland journeys. It had been sent out to make a sea passage to a fixed destination. And with the potential of then sailing through to the other side of the Northwest Passage. But it was always going to be a water-borne expedition.

LD: So no plan B?

AL: There could be no plan B because the expedition was designed to carry eight or nine tons of magnetic survey equipment to magnetic north. This is why they were fourteen officers and medical experts on board. Their job was to man and service the magnetic survey equipment. This was the most impressive set of magnetic recording equipment ever sent into the High Arctic and it was part of a global terrestrial project to understand the earth’s magnetic field with the possibility, had the field produced nice regular results, of developing a Victorian form of GPS in which the earth’s internal core would give you the answer of where precisely on the face of the planet you were. This project started by Humboldt. Humboldt takes these fundamental magnetic readings at Casa Maracay in the Peruvian Andes on the equator and then observes on the coast of Peru during a thick fog that it is possible to locate yourself by magnetic influence. And he suggested that it may be possible to create a system of navigation based purely on magnetic readings. This was taken up by his disciples both in Germany and in Britain and it formed the basis of the scientific pressure that led to the dispatch of the Franklin expedition. It’s commonly assumed that Franklin was sent to finish the Northwest Passage. This simply isn’t true. Franklin was sent to complete a magnetic research project which is why he had to leave in 1845. His departure date was set by the end of a global magnetic research project. His object was to take readings using the same equipment and the same systems at the same times as observers all around the world, from Tasmania, through to Russia.

LD: So that sort of presaged the first International Polar Year of 1882-83?

AL: Yeah. The attempt to understand international magnetic influence is the biggest science project of the mid-nineteenth century. It’s completely international; all the great nations of the earth were involved in one way or another. And the British Empire was the most extensive in terms of its spread and ends up being hugely important. And this isn’t the only magnetic research project going on in Canada, there were others. So Northern Canada partly accessible from the St. Lawrence Valley and the great cities is also involved. So parties are going up to the high North into the Hudson’s Bay territory to do research as well. They’re also doing it out in the far west, in the Bering Straits. So Canada is playing a leading part in answering a huge problem, and the answer ends up being negative. This magnetic field is not producing standardized usable predictable results. And the movement of the earth’s magnetic core in uncertain rather than certain. It’s not a substitute for heavenly observations which is what they were looking for. But in the process, they do understand the scientific phenomenon much better. So Franklin’s job was to produce nine months’ worth of daily detailed magnetic observations of the strength, the intensity, the fluctuation and the variation in the earth’s magnetic field. And he was sent to do this because he was the navy’s leading magnetic scientist, he’s a fellow of the Royal Society and he’d been conducting magnetic research since he was midshipman on the coast of Australia with Matthew Flinders in 1802. So his entire adult life had been about magnetic research.

3) Why did they fail?

AL: I wouldn’t say the expedition failed. They reached their target, they conducted their observations they were sent to achieve. They were unable to extricate themselves from the position to which they had reached. If we use the analogy of a mountaineering expedition, if you get to the top, you’ve climbed it. If you fail to get all the way down again, you are still the first at the top. The whole question of who got to the top of Mount Everest first- was it Mallory and Irvine or was it later in the 1950s hangs on a missing boxed brownie which will hopefully turn up with a picture of two men standing on the summit of Mount Everest in tweed. It would be delicious to know that. So Franklin in fact succeeded. The navigational feat of reaching the point where the ships became beset was unprecedented. Nobody had ever got there, ever before. Parry, who was the most successful Arctic navigator, had no idea you could do this. And he was still alive to know it, he was a close friend of Franklin’s. They succeeded. They got to their target, they would have conducted those observations, but at the end they couldn’t get out again. So failure is I think is probably the wrong word. They were desperately unfortunate, but then the Arctic is a very treacherous place. Had they turned up the following year, they would have never have got in. Possibly even if they’d managed to get further in in the first year instead of wintering at Beechey Island, they might have pushed into Peel Sound, and then driven out again. So that one year opened that strait up in a way that was very uncommon. It was a great fortune to get in there and Franklin’s decision to push on was a very brave one.

LD: But ultimately not fortuitous for his party?

AL: The expedition was doomed, and it was a tragic loss of life. But on the other hand, they did achieve the mission they’d been sent to achieve.

4) Where are the ships?

AL: I don’t think finding Franklin’s ships will make much difference at all. We know where they were when they were abandoned. The plans of them exist, we could build them again tomorrow if we wished. We won’t find any of the evidence we need, the written evidence to actually understand the expedition: we need the ships’ log, we need the magnetic research journals, we need the other written material that would have been on board those ships- we’re not going to find that. Even if they have sunk in perfect conditions like the Breadalbane, one of the supply vessels that split and sank up near Beechey Island, they’ll tell us nothing that we don’t already know. So apart from being to be able to put an X marks the spot in Northern Canada, that’s about it really.

5) How do you know?

AL: There’s a standard narrative of the Franklin story and it’s a narrative largely shaped by Lady Jane Franklin, Francis Leopold McClintock and others in the mid-nineteenth century who wished to skirt round the rather unpleasant issue that this expedition had eaten itself, because Englishmen don’t do that. That’s something that other people do. And so rather than saying that this was a very important scientific contribution to the development of earth science and navigation they decided that it was best to talk about this as a geographical exploring mission and to fit it into a chronology in which the English, who are quite very stupid people, continually tried to do something which was impossible and economically utterly useless. But when you read Franklin’s correspondence from the 1820s, he knows that it’s completely and utterly useless. And there’s no point in achieving the Northwest Passage because ships cannot use it for anything; it is completely unviable- in two hundred tons sailing ships were never going to use it for trade, there’s no point in doing it. They go back to do the magnetic science. I realized this, having read all these grand narratives in which Franklin’s is a kind of doomed expedition and then they finish the chart by looking for Franklin, which is in part true. But every single expedition that looked for Franklin did magnetic research. Because the man who sent Franklin sent all of them, and they made sure- paid homage to him by- Edward Sabine. And they all brought their data back, even McClintock, who was not operating under government fund, but he went and got all the gear from Sabine and did all the work. It’s about the magnets. When you’re at Point Victory and you stand on the beach where they abandoned, you then read that account in McClintock’s book, what he found when they got there. This great pile, they brought all their gear ashore and they’d sort through it and then they decided what they were going to take, what they were going to leave. What was vital what had to stay. And right on top of the pile, the last thing they threw on was a 6-inch dip circle, a key piece of magnetic survey gear. Still in the case, still with the owner’s initials on it. And that’s in the collection at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. And I thought, if the last thing they’re abandoning before setting out on a doomed enterprise to survive is a very heavy cumbersome piece of magnetic survey gear, this stuff must be important. Then you re-read the instructions: it’s all about science. Then you re-read the whole discussion about why they were going to send the expedition in the first place. It’s driven by the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It is a big science project. This is the great Hadron collider of its day, it’s a huge expensive high risk science. It had to be done in a very inhospitable place, but it’s not about getting through to the other side. That would be nice as well. And one thing the British had learned about Arctic expedition was that you always have to have another story. So Franklin is going up there: let’s do that thing we shouldn’t do. He gets his results, he gets out, he comes home, he hasn’t made the Northwest Passage. Is somebody going to tell him he’s failed? No. He is going to be the hero of the hour because he has done exactly what his instructions have ordered him to do. He’s achieved this very high and very precise location for this magnetic research project. He would have been lorded to the skies for doing that if he’d come back, sailed in, sailed straight back again. That would have been magnificent. If he’d sailed through the other side as well, that would have been even more magnificent but if you’ve got two targets, there’s always a good PR story. Because if you’ve achieved one of them, the other one can be quietly just dropped. But what they ended up doing was forgetting the thing he had done because we don’t have any of the data sets. Edward Sabine was desperate to get them and that’s one of the things that kept him pushing, search missions. He knew the men were dead but he wanted the data. And he was prepared to send more men to risk their lives in the High Arctic to get some scraps of paper to complete his sets. Would Franklin have gone on to complete the passage, given where he was, another two hundred miles of open sea, he would have got through. He would have followed the route that Collinson pioneered. Collinson came very close to the site where Franklin was six-seven years later. So it was possible to do that, and Collinson did it and Franklin did have limited but usable power.

6) Why do you care?

AL: The Franklin Expedition is one of the great mysteries of the past. It’s one of those stories we don’t know precisely what happened because there were no survivors, and there is no material survival beyond the famous letter, which Crozier and Fitzjames penned at various stages which was recovered by McClintock. So we don’t have enough evidence to be sure that we can create a rock solid chronology or a rock solid explanation. So we’re left with space. We don’t know where the ships are, we don’t know why the men abandoned ship precisely, we don’t know what Franklin died of. We do know that the three men buried at Beechey Island died of tuberculosis which is very interesting because the standard account of the expedition, Richard Cyriax’s account- Cyriax’s day job was a doctor; he was a tuberculosis specialist, but he didn’t know the role of tuberculosis in the Franklin Expedition because this was written in the 1930s. Owen Beattie’s expedition in the 1980s was a long way in the future. The Franklin Expedition means that we don’t know it all and the chances of us ever finding enough evidence to be confident that we can explain the whole of this phenomenon is very remote. And I think history should not be about knowing everything: it should be about having some space in which we can use our imagination, our logic, our intuition and the available evidence to create an argument which we can then advance and debate and discuss. So there are those who still think that Franklin was trying to get to the Bering Strait, there one rather interesting man who still believes that there was no cannibalism on the Franklin Expedition because they were British and from the Royal Navy and therefore they couldn’t have done. There are others who believe that the expedition was a complete waste of time because they could have done it on snowshoes if only they’d listen to John Rae and travelled like the locals. But I defy them to do that with eight tons of magnetic survey gear which includes things like barometers which don’t last very long when you’re yomping around and carrying it on your back. So it’s about getting the story back onto its proper bearings because it’s a big story, because it’s had a lot of celebrity in naval history, in Canadian history, in history of exploration. People have run off with it in different directions and missed the point. There’s a very straightforward simple explanation for why they went, what they were trying to do and how that fed into what ultimately happened. People have just ignored this because they’re pursuing other agendas, whether it’s an agenda like Charles Francis Hall of recovering the stories from the Inuit; whether it’s making it about maps and allowing geographers to write the story; whatever versions there are, I was convinced that this was about magnetic science. It’s about high politics, magnetic science, and about a major intellectual achievement which was to take some of the pioneering work of Alexander von Humboldt and turn it into a much grander system. And it ties into people like Francis Beaufort the great hydrographer of the navy because Beaufort wants to know what the magnetic variation is and as the British pushed further and further north and south, they find the variation increases. So if you sailing the Mediterranean, magnetic variation isn’t much of a problem but if you’re going through the roaring forties to Australia, it is, and if you’re whaling up in the Bering sea, it is. And so understanding that phenomenon becomes important as this as the spread of British economic activity goes north and south. And for men like Franklin, James Clark Ross, this is their career. They will do this over and over again, they will go three and four times into the frozen North in pursuit of science. Parry’s portrait is, no- James Clark Ross’s portrait is very good: he’s standing there, dressed as a naval officer with a sword in his hand with a fur cloak and there’s a dip circle. And most times that portrait is used it’s cropped to cut the dip circle out, because nobody wants to know about magnetic research, they want to know about a romantic heroic figure with a sword in his hand and a fur cloak on his shoulders who’s going to find something. Ross spent most of his time sitting in a little wooden hut watching magnetic needles flicker.

7) What is the significance of Franklin’s last expedition?

AL: The significance of the expedition is, ultimately, that the whole of the north of the American continent and beyond into the archipelagoes is Canadian, because it’s stuffed full of dead Englishmen. In fact, most of them are all Acadians and quite a few Scots and Irish. The British gave Canada the Far North and their claim to it was a very human one: they’d found it, they’d mapped it, they’d named it, they’d buried their dead in it. It is a corner of a forgotten field that will ever have some Englishness about it. So that’s the significance of it. It also is part of a process that advances the understanding of terrestrial magnetic science to a very large extent. And by prompting the world’s largest search and rescue mission, it shows that the Victorians had a heart, and also that when they were using those heartfelt emotions- Franklin was a man that everybody loved, so they went to find him. If it’d been Edward Belcher, nobody would have gone. Belcher even went to look for Franklin. The search and rescue missions ended up making the chart of the Canadian North, the one that survived pretty much until the age of air reconnaissance and aerial mapping. And it means that all those features up there have recognizably British names. So the Canadian Arctic starts with the Elizabethans and then it goes into the regency and then in the Franklin search, it’s high Victorian. If you follow the names, until you get to Amundsen, there is very little that isn’t British. And that mapping and naming leads to owning and possession. So it determined who is the owner. It’s not actually until that when the Americans started going up to look for Franklin, one of the things they did was to dig up and send home the English remains. It’s quite significant: if we turf the English out of here, we might be able to establish a claim. But they couldn’t find all of them. So they sent two Englishmen home, one of them was interred at the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, and the man they think is John Irving is buried in Edinburgh. I think in both cases their identifications are pretty flaky. But they are men from the Franklin Expedition, that’s quite clear. So that’s the significance of it. And it gave Victorian Britain, in the age of the Great Exhibition, that sense that Britain was the greatest nation in the world, that high Victorian self-confidence, that sense of destiny. The British were the new great imperial power and it reminded them in a rather hubristic way that, actually, they weren’t all that great. Even their very best wasn’t good enough, they got caught out, didn’t work, failed. It brought them face to face with failure and with the darkest recesses of humanity. And for an expedition that set out to serve humanity it was a pretty strange and bizarre phenomenon that they ended up demonstrating that beneath that thin veneer of civilization this primeval savagery.

LD: I find it fascinating that the Franklin Expedition left in 1845 and that’s three years after the completion of the Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square, commemorating the greatness, the hegemony of the Royal Navy.

AL: It’s very interesting that when the answers finally came through, Lady Franklin, very skillfully, took the wishes of Parliament that she’d be refunded for her costs in sending Leopold McClintock’s expedition which finally solved the mystery. She said no. She said she did not wish to be refunded for this, but she did think it would be appropriate perhaps to pay for a public memorial. And she suggested it should be placed in Trafalgar Square. Of course, it would have been hugely inappropriate to do that, although Franklin was a Trafalgar veteran: he’d lost his hearing at the Battle of Trafalgar and he was on one of the ships that was at the heart of the fighting, HMS Bellerophon. So his naval career was interesting: he joins as a boy, he fought at Copenhagen under Nelson, he then circumnavigated Australia with Flinders, he fought in a major squadron action in Indonesian waters, essentially as a flag lieutenant of the East India Company commodore, he then fought at Trafalgar, and eventually he ended up in the War of 1812 where he starred in the boat attack leading up to the Battle of New Orleans and he was leading the party of sailors who stormed the American works on the other bank of the Mississippi on the day of the great battle. The English only lost half the battle- Franklin was on the winning side where he was. He got mentioned in dispatches but he didn’t get promoted. He went on an Arctic expedition to get his promotion. And within six years, he got himself made captain and a knight, and he became a superstar. Franklin, Parry, James Clark Ross, these men are iconic global superstars. Everybody knows who John Franklin is. These are brands that are instantly recognizable to early nineteenth century audiences.

LD: And is that part of the significance as well?

AL: It’s significant because having built this brand over twenty-five years that the Royal Navy could do everything and that, they just had to press on and they would solve the problem. It does all come crashing down. And in that sense perhaps Nelson has feet of clay and if not Nelson other officers. But, on the other hand, nobody else would have dared to do this. So, yes, it’s a failure in one sense but it’s not a failure of ambition or ability. It’s one of those things that happen when you strive at the uttermost boundaries of the humanly possible. It took a long time to climb Mount Everest and it took a long time to get through the Northwest Passage too. It’s worth nothing that Roald Amundsen did finally make the passage he overwintered at Gjoa Haven, or what is now known as Gjoa Haven, to do magnetic research, and he was inspired to do this by reading about Franklin. It all fits together. And Franklin- people often say, who is Franklin? Franklin was raised and trained in the Royal Navy as part of a dynasty of great navigators. Because he’s not an explorer, he’s a navigator: he makes charts that make it possible for other people to go back. So if Franklin had navigated the whole of the Northwest Passage there would have been a continuous accurate usable chart. That’s what he’s after. His charts of the north Canadian shore are a magnificent achievement. He was trained by Matthew Flinders who was also his cousin. Flinders was trained by William Bligh on the second breadfruit voyage, and of course Bligh was trained by James Cook. So Franklin comes from the very highest echelon of naval skill. His intellectual heritage is a very very impressive one. And ultimately- One of the reviewers of my book, a very good review, very incisive, he did say that he didn’t understand the difference between a navigator and an explorer. Well, I had written at some length in the book. The two things are very different. An explorer will find something, a navigator will find a way there and back again and will make it possible for others to follow in their footsteps. The men who make the maps and charts, these are the really great people. Any fool can stumble on something but being able to explain how they got there that’s the difficult bit.

I truly hope that the ships are not found because I don’t think it will add anything to what we know. And it will allow us to think that by finding things we’re answering problems, and the things don’t answer the problems. The problems are what happened, and the artifacts will not tell us that. They will just where the artifacts ended up. They’re stuck in the ice and if you look at the winds and currents it’s fairly obvious where they would have gone. If they’re not there, well, perhaps they did really get smashed to pieces on the beach. And if you stand on the beach, the ice is being pushed up the beach by the ice coming down the McClintock Channel with the wind behind it. The pressure of the ice, you can watch it, it’s literally creeping up the beach a millimetre at a time. A 250-ton wooden sailing ship wouldn’t stand a chance. Once they’re on the beach, they break up and the Inuit go on a very thorough recycling scavenge. Everything that was there was useful: you could make something of it, you could burn it, you could wear it- so they just cleared the place, which is their way. In the Arctic, there’s no free lunch, but there might be some free wood.