The confidence with which the expedition was planned reflected this history of partial success. The ships were prepared with unusual thoroughness. The crew complement was generous. The provisions were calculated for three years, with the expectation that the passage could be completed in one or two seasons. The Admiralty’s attitude toward the expedition was optimistic: this was the final problem to be solved, and the men and ships sent to solve it were the best available.
The confidence proved catastrophic. The expedition’s entrapment in the ice was not simply bad luck — it reflected a systematic underestimation of the specific ice conditions in Victoria Strait, combined with navigational decisions that cannot now be fully reconstructed but that sent the ships into the worst ice rather than around it.
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## The Search Expeditions and Why They Mattered
When the Franklin expedition failed to return by 1848, the Admiralty sent the first of what would eventually become more than forty search expeditions. The search effort was one of the largest sustained maritime operations in nineteenth-century British history, mobilizing ships and resources over a period of more than a decade in an attempt to find men who, as became gradually clear, had almost certainly been dead for years.
The search expeditions matter to the story of the eventual DNA identification for a specific reason: they gathered most of the physical evidence from which the history of the expedition’s end has been reconstructed. The Victory Point note was found by one of them. The first systematic surveys of the debris field along the King William Island coast were conducted by them. The physical evidence that combined with Inuit testimony to establish the basic outline of what happened — the ships beset, Franklin dead, the march south, the deaths along the route — came from the work of these expeditions.