Sir+John+Franklin

Sir John Franklin

Sir John Franklin was born in Spilsbury, Lincolnshire, on the 16th April 1786. At fourteen he entered the Royal Navy and saw his first active service a year later in the battle of Copenhagen. Franklin also served as midshipman under Matthew Flinders, his uncle by marriage, on the//Investigator// during its voyage of discovery in New Holland between 1801 and 1804. Franklin later said that this voyage kindled his lifelong passion for exploration. He fought in a number of battles during the Napoleonic wars, including the famous Battle of Trafalgar. When the Duke of Wellington defeated Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, arctic exploration became a popular way for the Navy's best young officers to distinguish themselves during peacetime and in May 1818 Franklin began his polar service as a second-in-command of Captain Buchan's failed voyage into the Spitsbergen ice.

A year later Franklin headed north again, this time in command of his own overland expedition, ordered by the British Admiralty to travel from the Hudson Bay to the Polar Sea where he was to map North America's unexplored arctic coast. Franklin succeeded in mapping 340km of the shoreline before a journey over the Canadian tundra resulted in the deaths of ten men from cold and hunger, arguably thanks to Franklin's lack of familiarity with northern conditions. Upon his return to London, Franklin was promoted to captain and returned to the northern area for a second overland expedition in 1825-1827, returning after mapping another 640km of arctic shoreline. He was later knighted for his work.

By the time Franklin and his men set out on their famous, failed expedition to find the North West Passage, he had already led four expeditions to the arctic, two of them in an effort to map the fabled passage. Franklin was considered to be a skilled explorer and some even considered him an expert on the arctic. Franklin spent six years as Colonial Governor of Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania). As such he was an important figure in his society and when his final expedition failed to return, the British Admiralty went to great pains to find him, and they weren't the only ones. Keen to get the scoop, on the 4th April 1850 the Toronto Globe offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could provide them with information about the missing sailors. This reward was later increased to a phenomenal 40,000 pounds.

Leopald McClintock led the last search party for Sir John Franklin. In 1859, whilst conducting the search, a cairn was found at Point Victory (King William's Island) containing writings that claimed "Sir John Franklin died on 11th June 1847" with the deaths of 24 other men preceding his own.

__ Sources __
 * Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. (1966), //Franklin, Sir John (1786-1847)//, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/franklin-sir-john-2066, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, (accessed 3/8/11).
 * Beattie, Owen; Geiger, John. (1987), **//Frozen in Time://** //The Fate of the Franklin Expedition//, Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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