The expeditions sent to the Arctic between 1818 and 1845 — Parry’s four voyages, the two Ross expeditions, Back’s voyages, and others — had progressively filled in the map of the Canadian Arctic. By 1845, the specific stretch of coastline that the Franklin expedition was sent to chart and navigate was relatively small in proportion to the whole. The assumption was that one more well-organized expedition, properly provisioned and commanded by an experienced officer, would complete the work.
The cultural context matters for understanding how the expedition was planned and staffed. The officers and men who sailed on Erebus and Terror were not naive about the difficulties of Arctic conditions — many of them had previous Arctic experience. But the institutional culture of the Royal Navy in this period placed considerable emphasis on naval officers’ ability to manage whatever conditions they encountered through discipline, hierarchy, skill, and endurance. The idea that conditions might be encountered against which these qualities were simply insufficient was not a comfortable one for the institution to contemplate.
This cultural context also shaped the response to the expedition’s disappearance. The initial assumption — that the expedition was simply delayed and that a search would find it — reflected an institutional reluctance to accept that a properly commanded Royal Navy expedition might have come to a catastrophic end. As years passed without news, the assumption gradually shifted, but the full weight of what had happened took time to be accepted.
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## The Provisioning Question: Tinned Food and Its Problems
The provisioning of the Franklin expedition attracted scientific and historical attention in the late twentieth century because of a specific detail: the tinned food that formed a substantial part of the expedition’s supplies was sealed with lead solder, and the bodies of the three men buried at Beechey Island were found to contain elevated lead levels when examined in the 1980s.