By the time he was promoted to commander and given command of HMS Clio — returning to Portsmouth in October 1844 — he was thirty-one years old, had served in three distinct theaters of operation, had been wounded in action, and had a service record that mixed conventional naval duty with unusual adventurous assignments. Sir John Barrow’s advocacy for him as a candidate for the Franklin command was not baseless.
He was promoted to captain on December 31, 1845 — a promotion that happened while he was already somewhere in the Arctic ice. He never knew about it.
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## Into the Ice
The Franklin expedition’s route took it through Lancaster Sound, along the northern coast of Devon Island and Cornwallis Island, and eventually south through Peel Sound and down Victoria Strait toward King William Island. The specific navigational decisions that led the ships to their eventual entrapment in the ice near King William Island rather than through the relatively ice-free southern route that later expeditions would use have been debated by historians, but the central fact is that by September 12, 1846, the ships were beset — locked in pack ice — in a position from which they would never be freed.
The first winter at Beechey Island, 1845–46, had passed without documented catastrophe beyond the deaths of three men who were buried there. The site of those burials — grave markers in the permafrost at Beechey Island — was discovered by search expeditions in 1850 and later examined with forensic methods in the 1980s and early 1990s by the anthropologist Owen Beattie. The bodies of Petty Officer John Torrington, Able Seaman John Hartnell, and Royal Marine William Braine were found preserved by the permafrost in remarkable condition. Analysis of their tissues found elevated levels of lead, contributing to a theory that the solder used to seal the expedition’s tinned food had contaminated the supplies and contributed to the crew’s physical deterioration over the voyage’s first year.