The first search parties departed in 1848, the year the ships’ crew abandoned them, though of course no one in Britain knew that at the time. The initial assumption was that the expedition was simply overdue and that a search effort would either find the men or find information about where they were. As years passed without results and as the search area expanded, the understanding of what had happened shifted.
Francis Leopold McClintock’s 1857–59 expedition, commissioned by Lady Jane Franklin after the Admiralty had wound down official search efforts, was the most significant. McClintock’s party found the Victory Point note in a cairn on the northwest coast of King William Island in May 1859. The note established the basic timeline: the ships had been beset since September 1846, Franklin had died in June 1847, and the survivors had abandoned the ships in April 1848. McClintock also found the boat with two skeletons that became one of the defining images of the expedition’s end — a vessel loaded with an apparently irrational quantity of heavy silver plate and other luxuries, dragged onto the island’s shore and abandoned.
The boat’s contents, and the specific quality of the evidence it contained, prompted extensive speculation about the state of the survivors at that point in the march. Why carry silver plate across the Arctic when every ounce of weight was a burden to exhausted men? The question has been answered in various ways: as evidence of a kind of determined maintenance of civilized norms in the face of disaster, as evidence of confusion and poor judgment caused by illness and hypothermia, as evidence of the specific psychological state of men who could not yet accept that their situation was as dire as it was. The uncertainty around this evidence — the absence of any surviving account of who decided to load the boat, or why — is emblematic of the larger challenge of interpreting the Franklin expedition’s final months.