The commander was Sir John Franklin, a veteran Arctic explorer who had led two previous overland expeditions to the region, in 1819–1822 and 1825–1827, and who had a reputation both for determination and for the catastrophic mortality of his first inland journey. He was fifty-nine years old in 1845. He was not the Admiralty’s first choice for the command, but he pressed successfully for the appointment.
His complement across the two ships totaled 129 men. The expedition was provisioned for three years. It carried enough tinned food — sealed in cans that would later attract significant scientific scrutiny — to sustain the crew through multiple Arctic winters if necessary. The ships were as well equipped as Victorian-era technology allowed for a voyage of this kind.
They stopped at the Orkney Islands, then at Greenland, where the last letters were sent home. A whaling captain named Dannett reported encountering the ships in Baffin Bay in late July 1845, waiting for ice to clear at the mouth of Lancaster Sound. That encounter — a brief conversation across the ice, a few traded words about the expedition’s intended course — was the last confirmed sighting of the Franklin expedition by anyone from outside the Arctic.
After that: silence.
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## James Fitzjames: The Officer With the Uncertain Origins
Among the 129 men who sailed from the Thames in May 1845, James Fitzjames occupied a peculiar position. He was captain of HMS Erebus — one of the two most senior officers on the expedition — and he had been recommended by Sir John Barrow, the influential Second Secretary of the Admiralty and the driving force behind decades of Royal Navy Arctic exploration, as a candidate for overall command. The Admiralty had judged him too young for that responsibility and placed Franklin above him, but Fitzjames’s presence on the expedition was a marker of how highly regarded he was in naval circles.