The most substantial letters were written to William Coningham, the son of his foster family, with whom he maintained a close friendship throughout his adult life. These letters cover the period of the expedition’s departure from England, the stop in the Orkney Islands, the passage to Greenland, and the early weeks of the Arctic voyage before the ships lost mail contact with Britain. They describe Fitzjames’s impressions of the other expedition officers and of Franklin himself with a frankness that reflects genuine close friendship and trust.
His description of Franklin is warmly positive: a good-humored man, well liked by the crew, committed to the expedition’s goals, and possessed of the experience and steadiness appropriate to its command. This assessment has sometimes been contrasted with the more critical assessments offered by some earlier biographers who focused on the disaster’s outcome and attributed it in part to Franklin’s leadership or decision-making. But Fitzjames’s letters are written from inside the expedition, before anything had gone wrong, and they represent the perspective of a man who had every reason to assess Franklin favorably — he was, after all, the commander on whose success the expedition’s outcome and Fitzjames’s own career advancement depended.
The humor and self-awareness in the letters are consistent features. Fitzjames was clearly a man who observed the world around him with a kind of affectionate irony, noting the idiosyncrasies of his colleagues and the occasional absurdities of naval life without bitterness or cynicism. The poem he wrote about the First Opium War under the pseudonym “Tom Bowline” — a poem that combined commentary on the campaign’s events with the kind of metrical wit that characterizes good occasional verse — fits this portrait.