Lady Franklin 20 x 16 inches, Acrylic on cradled panel, 2019
Lady Franklin (1791- 1875) was, famously, the wife and widow of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. She was born Jane Griffin, daughter of John Griffin, a wealthy silk manufacturer who would become the governor of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, one of London’s traditional guilds. Both John and his wife Jane Guillemard, who died when she was three, had Huguenot ancestry. Young Jane grew up comfortably in Bloomsbury, London. When she was 12, she attended a boarding school for ladies in Chelsea. Intelligent and well-behaved, she was an excellent student, even if she sported a mischievous streak that belied her serious demeanor. Her greatest education was in traveling abroad, as was the custom among the wealthy. Jane, with her father and sisters, journeyed extensively throughout western Europe. Restless and curious, she developed a virtual passion for travel, exploration, and adventure.
At an early age Jane Griffin showed evidence of a strong, resolute, and disciplined character. She shunned the traditional and expected activities of the fair sex, like needlework, housekeeping, teas and balls, reading romantic novels, and gossiping. She preferred hiking, mountain climbing, sailing. She rigorously devoted herself to reading, studying, and attending lectures. She took notes on everything she experienced, kept diaries and journals, and wrote copious letters.
Although she avoided the societal obligation to marry and have children, she might have done so. A striking, petite, blue-eyed brunette beauty with a lovely complexion she must have caught many an eye, but she obviously was much too much for the average man. She did develop romantic interests in two scientific gentlemen, one, a medical student, the other, the noted London physician Peter Mark Roget, who is best known for the thesaurus that bears his name. Nothing, though, came of her interests. Nevertheless, at a time of her life when marriage was no longer expected, she felicitously found her soul mate. It came about thus. A friend of hers was poetess Eleanor Anne Porden, a remarkable woman who in 1822 had published a two-volume epic poem, Coeur de Lion or The Third Crusade. Although in poor health, the 28-year old Eleanor got married to Arctic explorer Captain John Franklin in August of 1823. An explorer, Franklin seemed romantic to her and when they met in 1818, he inspired her poem, The Arctic Expeditions. She had his child, but, shortly after her husband had set off on another expedition to the Arctic, she succumbed to tuberculosis and died on February 22, 1825.
When the widowed Franklin came back from the Arctic he struck up a friendship with Jane. Despite his adventurous profession, Franklin was a rather dull, dour, humorless fellow. Short, portly, and balding, he was not exactly dashing. Realizing, though, that they were kindred spirits and that their disparate personalities complemented each other, Jane and John fell in love. On November 5, 1828 they were wed. Jane was 36, John was 42. Franklin had agreed to allow his first wife to continue her literary career. And so it was understood that Jane would not be relegated to a drab domestic existence, but allowed her own pursuits.
John Franklin, born in Lincolnshire in 1786, had entered the Royal Navy as a boy. He had gone on an exploratory voyage to Australia and had participated in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. He would reach the rank of captain. He had commanded a ship in an 1818 expedition that attempted to reach the North Pole. He led two land expeditions (1819-1822 and 1825-1827) that explored northwest Canada. These perilous ventures added a great deal to geographic knowledge of the area and made him something of a national hero.
During the early part of their marriage, the Franklins spent much time apart. John, now Sir John — for he had been knighted in 1829 — was serving in the Mediterranean as commander of the H.M.S. Rainbow, a small 28-gun warship. Jane, now Lady Franklin, spent a great deal of her time traveling, through Spain, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine. Such travel at that time entailed considerable hardship, if not danger, but also furnished much in the way of adventure and a chance to acquire knowledge not otherwise attainable.
When Sir John returned to England in 1833, he lobbied for some significant post, ideally the command of an Arctic expedition. The government, though, at that time was no longer sponsoring polar voyages and had given up on what was seen as a vain quest for the Northwest Passage. Instead, Sir John Franklin was given the governorship of Van Diemen’s Land, an island off the coast of southern Australia and now known as Tasmania. This was no plush assignment. The island was mostly a hell hole, a refuge for convicts and paupers.
When the Franklins reached Tasmania in 1836, they immediately tried to ameliorate conditions there. Lady Franklin was tireless in her efforts to help the female convicts and to improve relations with the aborigines. She tried to provide education and culture for the residents and, in a word, to civilize the place. Lady Franklin even had ambitions of setting up a university. Many of her humanitarian efforts, however, were greeted with indifference. She had built a classical temple to serve as a museum for Hobart (the capital), but it was a hundred years before the building was used for anything more than a storage shed for apples.
During her years in Australia, Lady Franklin took time to travel and explore. She journeyed through areas of Tasmania that no white woman had gone before. Mount Wellington, Tasmania’ highest mountain at 4000, she climbed, the first woman to do so. She was also the first woman to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney, 440 miles as the crow flies. She visited New Zealand and was inspired to study Maori language and customs. (Her curiosity was boundless and her energy and vitality for a woman pushing 50 was extraordinary).
Sir John was popular with the people, but was considered an inept outsider by much of the colonial establishment that did not welcome Franklin’s reforms and resented Jane’s unorthodox conduct. When Franklin had a dispute with his colonial secretary, Captain John Montagu, and ended up dismissing him, the establishment and the press took Montagu’s side. Montagu, from a prominent family, returned to England and used his influence to have Franklin recalled and replaced. Thus the Franklins set sail for England in January 1844.
Back in England, Sir John felt that he had been disgraced and feared there was no means of recouping his reputation. Yet, he was still renown as an heroic Arctic explorer. Fortuitously, the British government, with a renewed interest in polar exploration, was planning a new expedition to complete the mapping of the Arctic coastline and perhaps at last find a Northwest Passage, a clear sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Although Franklin was not the first choice to command the expedition, he was offered the position and gratefully accepted it. Sir John, however, was scarcely fit for the physically demanding task: he was almost sixty, overweight, and out of shape. Yet, he had much experience — and certainly, guts.
The Franklin Expedition was to be a well-equipped venture: two ships, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, (both over 100 feet) and 134 hand-picked men. There would be food for 3 years and a library of 1000 books. The ships, state-of the art, were equipped with steam engines, a heating system, and boilers that distilled fresh water.
The expedition departed England on May 19, 1845, sailing to Aberdeen, the Orkney Islands, then to Greenland. On July 26, 1845 the two ships were seen moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound (north of Baffin Island) by a whaler. There was no further outside contact with the expedition. It was later determined that Franklin’s expedition spent the winter of 1845-6 in the harbor of Beechey Island, northwest of Baffin Island. In September of 1846 the Terror and the Erebus became trapped in the ice off King William Island, which lies north of continental Canada, a considerable distance southwest from Beechey Island. The ships never sailed again and the men of the expedition, some of whom tried to walk to safety, all perished of disease, exposure, and malnutrition.
Back in England, when two years had passed without word of the expedition, Lady Franklin lobbied the Admiralty to send a rescue party. But since the expedition was supposed to have had a three year supply of provisions, an expedition to search for what would soon be called the Lost Franklin Expedition was not mounted until 1848. There were several government sponsored expedition to find out what had happened to the Franklin; the Admiralty offered a 20,000 pound reward. Over a period of decades Lady Franklin herself would inspire and even fund many expeditions to search for her husband.
In 1850 evidence that Franklin’s expedition had wintered on Beechey Island was discovered. There was still much hope that the members of the expedition had survived. And there was much public interest in the expedition. The Admiralty was so confident of Franklin’s survival that they promoted him to rear admiral.
In 1854 a Scottish explorer John Rae, while doing survey work for the Hudson Bay Company, learned from the native Inuits the fate of the Franklin Expedition. He was told that he ships had become ice bound, and that the crew had all died, but not before resorting to cannibalism. When his report was made known, Rae was excoriated by the British public and by an outraged Lady Franklin. The mere suggestion that Englishmen could possibly become cannibals was offensive in the extreme. Later research, however, would confirm that some of Franklin’s men, those who had left the ice-bound ships, had indeed turned to cannibalism.
In 1857 Lady Franklin sent out Irish polar explorer Francis McClintock in the ship Fox to replicate Franklin’s voyage. He eventually reached King William Island and interviewed Inuits who confirmed what John Rae had previously learned. Notes found there revealed that Franklin had died on June 11, 1847, before his surviving men left the ship and set out on foot. (Therefore, Franklin would not have become a cannibal). When he returned to England in September 1859, McClintock was hailed as a hero who had at last found the Lost Franklin Expedition. He was even knighted.
The mystique of the Lost Franklin Expedition was not diminished and some of its mystery still remained. Expeditions would continue in the hope of finding not only the lost ships and men, but Franklin’s records. More men were lost searching for the Lost Expedition than on the original expedition itself, but much valued knowledge was gained of the seas and the islands of the area north of Canada. Lady Franklin can claim credit for providing much of the impetus for Arctic exploration in the mid 19th Century. It was she who encouraged the Americans to become involved in polar exploration.
While Lady Franklin was obsessed with learning the fate of her husband and devoted to preserving his memory, she continued to travel, often with her husband’s niece, who was her companion and secretary. Probably no woman of her time traveled so extensively. At one point she journeyed to the Shetland Islands, the northernmost part of England, just so that she could be as close as possible to her missing husband. After she learned of her husband’s tragic death, she did not spend her widowhood in isolation and mourning. When she died on July 18, 1875, at age 83, she was awaiting the return of another polar expedition she had helped to outfit.
Jane, Lady Franklin was probably the most famous widow in Victorian England, save for Queen Victoria herself. The Royal Geographical Society awarded Lady Franklin its Founder’s Gold Medal in 1860. She was honored and remembered in Tasmania as well as in England. While many geographical features have been named after Sir John Franklin, there is a Lady Franklin Bay on Ellesmere Island, north of Baffin Island. The force of her indefatigable character, her brand of valiant femininity, and the depth of her wifely devotion continues to arouse admiration.
Around 1850 a folk ballad named Lady Franklin’s Lament appeared and was quite popular in its day. It has been recorded by several contemporary artists, including Sinéad O’Connor and Connie Dover. Much has been written of the Lost Franklin Expedition, and there are several biographies of Lady Franklin. A 2018 AMC TV horror series The Terror presents a fictionalized account of the Franklin Expedition with Ciarán Hinds as John Franklin and Greta Scacchi as Lady Franklin.
Swiss painter Amélie Munier-Romilly executed a chalk portrait of Jane Griffin when she was 24. Another chalk drawing was made of her by Australia’s first professional artist Thomas Bock when she was 46, but Jane, camera shy, had no photo portraits taken of her.
The ships Terror and Erebus were only recently located. The submerged wreck of the Erebus, which Franklin captained, was discovered in 2014 in Queen Maud’s Bay, west of King William Island. The wreck of the Terror was found in 2016 off the southwest coast of King William Island, 57 miles of south of where it had been abandoned and 31 miles from the Erebus. Artifacts have been recovered from both wrecks. Great Britain claimed possession of the artifacts, but conferred ownership of the ships to the Canadian and Inuit governments.
In 1906 the long-sought Northwest Passage was finally traversed by sea. Franklin’s dream was achieved by the greatest polar explorer of them all, Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who would be the first to reach the South Pole and among the first to fly over the North Pole. Unlike Franklin and others, Amundsen used a small boat with a shallow draft and a crew of only 6 men. But like Franklin, he was iced in on the shore of King William Island. He remained there for two years. Only after a third winter did he eventually reach Nome, Alaska. From there Amundsen, alone, skied 500 miles east to Eagle, Alaska, on the Canadian border, the nearest telegraph office from which he could announce his success to the world. He then skied the 500 miles back! The expedition took three and half years. The passage Amundsen had discovered was, though, too shallow and ice prone to be of commercial value. (There is a thought that with recent warming of the polar regions an accessible Arctic passage from Atlantic to Pacific might at last become a reality).
At an early age Jane Griffin showed evidence of a strong, resolute, and disciplined character. She shunned the traditional and expected activities of the fair sex, like needlework, housekeeping, teas and balls, reading romantic novels, and gossiping. She preferred hiking, mountain climbing, sailing. She rigorously devoted herself to reading, studying, and attending lectures. She took notes on everything she experienced, kept diaries and journals, and wrote copious letters.
Although she avoided the societal obligation to marry and have children, she might have done so. A striking, petite, blue-eyed brunette beauty with a lovely complexion she must have caught many an eye, but she obviously was much too much for the average man. She did develop romantic interests in two scientific gentlemen, one, a medical student, the other, the noted London physician Peter Mark Roget, who is best known for the thesaurus that bears his name. Nothing, though, came of her interests. Nevertheless, at a time of her life when marriage was no longer expected, she felicitously found her soul mate. It came about thus. A friend of hers was poetess Eleanor Anne Porden, a remarkable woman who in 1822 had published a two-volume epic poem, Coeur de Lion or The Third Crusade. Although in poor health, the 28-year old Eleanor got married to Arctic explorer Captain John Franklin in August of 1823. An explorer, Franklin seemed romantic to her and when they met in 1818, he inspired her poem, The Arctic Expeditions. She had his child, but, shortly after her husband had set off on another expedition to the Arctic, she succumbed to tuberculosis and died on February 22, 1825.
When the widowed Franklin came back from the Arctic he struck up a friendship with Jane. Despite his adventurous profession, Franklin was a rather dull, dour, humorless fellow. Short, portly, and balding, he was not exactly dashing. Realizing, though, that they were kindred spirits and that their disparate personalities complemented each other, Jane and John fell in love. On November 5, 1828 they were wed. Jane was 36, John was 42. Franklin had agreed to allow his first wife to continue her literary career. And so it was understood that Jane would not be relegated to a drab domestic existence, but allowed her own pursuits.
John Franklin, born in Lincolnshire in 1786, had entered the Royal Navy as a boy. He had gone on an exploratory voyage to Australia and had participated in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. He would reach the rank of captain. He had commanded a ship in an 1818 expedition that attempted to reach the North Pole. He led two land expeditions (1819-1822 and 1825-1827) that explored northwest Canada. These perilous ventures added a great deal to geographic knowledge of the area and made him something of a national hero.
During the early part of their marriage, the Franklins spent much time apart. John, now Sir John — for he had been knighted in 1829 — was serving in the Mediterranean as commander of the H.M.S. Rainbow, a small 28-gun warship. Jane, now Lady Franklin, spent a great deal of her time traveling, through Spain, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine. Such travel at that time entailed considerable hardship, if not danger, but also furnished much in the way of adventure and a chance to acquire knowledge not otherwise attainable.
When Sir John returned to England in 1833, he lobbied for some significant post, ideally the command of an Arctic expedition. The government, though, at that time was no longer sponsoring polar voyages and had given up on what was seen as a vain quest for the Northwest Passage. Instead, Sir John Franklin was given the governorship of Van Diemen’s Land, an island off the coast of southern Australia and now known as Tasmania. This was no plush assignment. The island was mostly a hell hole, a refuge for convicts and paupers.
When the Franklins reached Tasmania in 1836, they immediately tried to ameliorate conditions there. Lady Franklin was tireless in her efforts to help the female convicts and to improve relations with the aborigines. She tried to provide education and culture for the residents and, in a word, to civilize the place. Lady Franklin even had ambitions of setting up a university. Many of her humanitarian efforts, however, were greeted with indifference. She had built a classical temple to serve as a museum for Hobart (the capital), but it was a hundred years before the building was used for anything more than a storage shed for apples.
During her years in Australia, Lady Franklin took time to travel and explore. She journeyed through areas of Tasmania that no white woman had gone before. Mount Wellington, Tasmania’ highest mountain at 4000, she climbed, the first woman to do so. She was also the first woman to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney, 440 miles as the crow flies. She visited New Zealand and was inspired to study Maori language and customs. (Her curiosity was boundless and her energy and vitality for a woman pushing 50 was extraordinary).
Sir John was popular with the people, but was considered an inept outsider by much of the colonial establishment that did not welcome Franklin’s reforms and resented Jane’s unorthodox conduct. When Franklin had a dispute with his colonial secretary, Captain John Montagu, and ended up dismissing him, the establishment and the press took Montagu’s side. Montagu, from a prominent family, returned to England and used his influence to have Franklin recalled and replaced. Thus the Franklins set sail for England in January 1844.
Back in England, Sir John felt that he had been disgraced and feared there was no means of recouping his reputation. Yet, he was still renown as an heroic Arctic explorer. Fortuitously, the British government, with a renewed interest in polar exploration, was planning a new expedition to complete the mapping of the Arctic coastline and perhaps at last find a Northwest Passage, a clear sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Although Franklin was not the first choice to command the expedition, he was offered the position and gratefully accepted it. Sir John, however, was scarcely fit for the physically demanding task: he was almost sixty, overweight, and out of shape. Yet, he had much experience — and certainly, guts.
The Franklin Expedition was to be a well-equipped venture: two ships, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, (both over 100 feet) and 134 hand-picked men. There would be food for 3 years and a library of 1000 books. The ships, state-of the art, were equipped with steam engines, a heating system, and boilers that distilled fresh water.
The expedition departed England on May 19, 1845, sailing to Aberdeen, the Orkney Islands, then to Greenland. On July 26, 1845 the two ships were seen moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound (north of Baffin Island) by a whaler. There was no further outside contact with the expedition. It was later determined that Franklin’s expedition spent the winter of 1845-6 in the harbor of Beechey Island, northwest of Baffin Island. In September of 1846 the Terror and the Erebus became trapped in the ice off King William Island, which lies north of continental Canada, a considerable distance southwest from Beechey Island. The ships never sailed again and the men of the expedition, some of whom tried to walk to safety, all perished of disease, exposure, and malnutrition.
Back in England, when two years had passed without word of the expedition, Lady Franklin lobbied the Admiralty to send a rescue party. But since the expedition was supposed to have had a three year supply of provisions, an expedition to search for what would soon be called the Lost Franklin Expedition was not mounted until 1848. There were several government sponsored expedition to find out what had happened to the Franklin; the Admiralty offered a 20,000 pound reward. Over a period of decades Lady Franklin herself would inspire and even fund many expeditions to search for her husband.
In 1850 evidence that Franklin’s expedition had wintered on Beechey Island was discovered. There was still much hope that the members of the expedition had survived. And there was much public interest in the expedition. The Admiralty was so confident of Franklin’s survival that they promoted him to rear admiral.
In 1854 a Scottish explorer John Rae, while doing survey work for the Hudson Bay Company, learned from the native Inuits the fate of the Franklin Expedition. He was told that he ships had become ice bound, and that the crew had all died, but not before resorting to cannibalism. When his report was made known, Rae was excoriated by the British public and by an outraged Lady Franklin. The mere suggestion that Englishmen could possibly become cannibals was offensive in the extreme. Later research, however, would confirm that some of Franklin’s men, those who had left the ice-bound ships, had indeed turned to cannibalism.
In 1857 Lady Franklin sent out Irish polar explorer Francis McClintock in the ship Fox to replicate Franklin’s voyage. He eventually reached King William Island and interviewed Inuits who confirmed what John Rae had previously learned. Notes found there revealed that Franklin had died on June 11, 1847, before his surviving men left the ship and set out on foot. (Therefore, Franklin would not have become a cannibal). When he returned to England in September 1859, McClintock was hailed as a hero who had at last found the Lost Franklin Expedition. He was even knighted.
The mystique of the Lost Franklin Expedition was not diminished and some of its mystery still remained. Expeditions would continue in the hope of finding not only the lost ships and men, but Franklin’s records. More men were lost searching for the Lost Expedition than on the original expedition itself, but much valued knowledge was gained of the seas and the islands of the area north of Canada. Lady Franklin can claim credit for providing much of the impetus for Arctic exploration in the mid 19th Century. It was she who encouraged the Americans to become involved in polar exploration.
While Lady Franklin was obsessed with learning the fate of her husband and devoted to preserving his memory, she continued to travel, often with her husband’s niece, who was her companion and secretary. Probably no woman of her time traveled so extensively. At one point she journeyed to the Shetland Islands, the northernmost part of England, just so that she could be as close as possible to her missing husband. After she learned of her husband’s tragic death, she did not spend her widowhood in isolation and mourning. When she died on July 18, 1875, at age 83, she was awaiting the return of another polar expedition she had helped to outfit.
Jane, Lady Franklin was probably the most famous widow in Victorian England, save for Queen Victoria herself. The Royal Geographical Society awarded Lady Franklin its Founder’s Gold Medal in 1860. She was honored and remembered in Tasmania as well as in England. While many geographical features have been named after Sir John Franklin, there is a Lady Franklin Bay on Ellesmere Island, north of Baffin Island. The force of her indefatigable character, her brand of valiant femininity, and the depth of her wifely devotion continues to arouse admiration.
Around 1850 a folk ballad named Lady Franklin’s Lament appeared and was quite popular in its day. It has been recorded by several contemporary artists, including Sinéad O’Connor and Connie Dover. Much has been written of the Lost Franklin Expedition, and there are several biographies of Lady Franklin. A 2018 AMC TV horror series The Terror presents a fictionalized account of the Franklin Expedition with Ciarán Hinds as John Franklin and Greta Scacchi as Lady Franklin.
Swiss painter Amélie Munier-Romilly executed a chalk portrait of Jane Griffin when she was 24. Another chalk drawing was made of her by Australia’s first professional artist Thomas Bock when she was 46, but Jane, camera shy, had no photo portraits taken of her.
The ships Terror and Erebus were only recently located. The submerged wreck of the Erebus, which Franklin captained, was discovered in 2014 in Queen Maud’s Bay, west of King William Island. The wreck of the Terror was found in 2016 off the southwest coast of King William Island, 57 miles of south of where it had been abandoned and 31 miles from the Erebus. Artifacts have been recovered from both wrecks. Great Britain claimed possession of the artifacts, but conferred ownership of the ships to the Canadian and Inuit governments.
In 1906 the long-sought Northwest Passage was finally traversed by sea. Franklin’s dream was achieved by the greatest polar explorer of them all, Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who would be the first to reach the South Pole and among the first to fly over the North Pole. Unlike Franklin and others, Amundsen used a small boat with a shallow draft and a crew of only 6 men. But like Franklin, he was iced in on the shore of King William Island. He remained there for two years. Only after a third winter did he eventually reach Nome, Alaska. From there Amundsen, alone, skied 500 miles east to Eagle, Alaska, on the Canadian border, the nearest telegraph office from which he could announce his success to the world. He then skied the 500 miles back! The expedition took three and half years. The passage Amundsen had discovered was, though, too shallow and ice prone to be of commercial value. (There is a thought that with recent warming of the polar regions an accessible Arctic passage from Atlantic to Pacific might at last become a reality).
