This document is the only written record left by any member of the Franklin expedition that has ever been found. Everything else known about the expedition’s time in the Arctic comes from physical evidence at the various sites where remains and artifacts were eventually located, and from the oral accounts gathered from Inuit witnesses by later investigators.
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## Who Was in Command
Franklin’s death on June 11, 1847, created a command question that the surviving record answers with the note but only partially explains.
Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was an experienced Arctic and Antarctic explorer. He had sailed with William Parry in the 1820s and with James Clark Ross in the Antarctic in the late 1830s. He was Irish, from County Down, and had been Franklin’s second-in-command on the Terror as captain of that ship. After Franklin’s death, the expedition was his.
Fitzjames’s position was that of Crozier’s immediate subordinate. He had been captain of Erebus throughout the expedition and remained in that role after Franklin died. The note documents this clearly: Crozier signs as “Captain & Senior Officer,” Fitzjames as “Captain, H.M.S. Erebus.”
The specific dynamic between Crozier and Fitzjames during the ten months between Franklin’s death in June 1847 and the note’s writing in April 1848 — how decisions were made, how morale was managed, how the accelerating losses of officers and men were processed — is not documented. The letters Fitzjames wrote during the early months of the voyage are full of personality: he describes the other officers, comments on the landscape, reflects on the voyage’s progress with humor and affection. But those letters stopped when the ships lost contact with the outside world in the summer of 1845. What passed through his mind during the two years of entrapment and deterioration that followed is unknown.