Beechey Island. Three lonely graves stand beside the sea on a barren island in the Canadian High Arctic. Behind them lies a landscape of gravel, rock and permafrost. Ahead, the cold waters of Lancaster Sound stretch towards the maze of islands and channels that form the Northwest Passage.
The names on the graves are John Torrington, John Hartnell and William Braine. All three sailed from England in 1845 aboard Sir John Franklin’s expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. None of the expedition returned. Beechey Island is one of the most haunting historic sites in the Arctic, and the place where the first real clues to one of the greatest mysteries in the history of exploration were discovered.
For anyone interested in Franklin, this isn’t simply another stop on an Arctic itinerary. This is where the story really begins. And after following Franklin’s route northwards through the Canadian Arctic, I had been particularly looking forward to reaching it.
We had hoped to explore Beechey Island by sea kayak. After days when fog had repeatedly dictated what we could and couldn’t do, conditions were beginning to look a little more promising. The fog had lifted slightly and there was at least the possibility that we might be able to launch.
Then somebody spotted a polar bear.
At the edge of the island was a female polar bear, apparently in good condition. Suddenly the day’s plans changed completely. In the Arctic, wildlife quite rightly takes priority. With a polar bear ashore, there would be no landing on Beechey Island and no sea kayaking close to it.
Instead, we watched from the safety of our Zodiac.
It was an extraordinary way to arrive at such an important historic place. The bear moved along the coast before entering the water and swimming across the bay towards the remains of Northumberland House. Polar bears are remarkably powerful swimmers and, from the Zodiac, we could watch her moving steadily through the cold Arctic water.
The juxtaposition was wonderful. We had come to Beechey Island because of a human story from 1845, but the Arctic reminded us that this is still very much a wild landscape. More than 180 years after Franklin’s ships wintered here, a polar bear could still determine whether humans were able to go ashore.
Unable to land, we Zodiac-cruised along the coastline instead. Eventually the three famous graves came into view from the water. We couldn’t stand beside them as I had imagined we might, but perhaps seeing them from offshore made the experience even more atmospheric. Three small markers stood against an enormous, empty Arctic landscape, looking incredibly isolated.
Torrington. Hartnell. Braine.
HMS Erebus and HMS Terror
It is difficult to see those graves without wondering what the men aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror must have thought as they buried their companions here during that first winter.
For centuries, European explorers had dreamed of finding a sea route across the top of North America. A Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific could potentially provide a shorter trading route to Asia, avoiding the enormous voyage around South America. On a map it looked tantalisingly possible. On the ground – or more accurately, on the ice – the reality was very different.
Thousands of islands form the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, separated by a maze of channels, sounds and straits. For much of the year they are frozen, and even during summer enormous areas can remain clogged with sea ice. Expedition after expedition attempted to find a route through. Some turned back. Some became trapped. Some disappeared.
Then, in 1845, Britain launched what was intended to be the best-equipped Arctic expedition ever assembled.
Sir John Franklin was already an experienced Arctic explorer. At 59 he was older than many expedition commanders, but he had previously led major journeys through northern Canada and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. For his final expedition he was given two exceptionally strong ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
Both already had impressive polar pedigrees. Originally built as Royal Navy bomb vessels, their immensely strong hulls made them suitable for conversion to polar exploration ships. Under James Clark Ross they had already sailed to Antarctica, helping explore huge areas of coastline and giving their names to Mount Erebus and Mount Terror.
For Franklin’s expedition they were transformed again. Their hulls were strengthened for ice. They had internal heating and steam engines adapted from railway locomotives, giving them limited powered movement when conditions prevented sailing. They carried preserved food, scientific equipment and extensive libraries.
Franklin Expedition
The expedition left England in May 1845 with 134 officers and crew. After reaching Greenland, five men were sent home, leaving 129 aboard the two ships when they disappeared into the Canadian Arctic. They carried provisions intended to sustain them for several years.
Franklin’s objective sounded deceptively simple: sail through Lancaster Sound, find the Northwest Passage and reach the Pacific. They would never return. After entering Lancaster Sound during the summer of 1845, Franklin needed somewhere to spend the winter. He chose the sheltered waters beside Beechey Island, on the southwestern side of Devon Island. For the next several months, Erebus and Terror were frozen into the ice.
Looking across the bay from our Zodiac, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the isolation.
Two wooden ships surrounded by a seemingly endless frozen sea. Temperatures plunging far below zero. Weeks without seeing the sun. Outside, an almost completely barren landscape. Inside, 129 men attempting to maintain the routines and discipline of the Royal Navy while waiting for another Arctic summer.
The crews weren’t simply sitting and waiting. They carried out scientific observations, maintained equipment and prepared for the following season. Archaeological evidence shows that they also established facilities ashore.
The First Deaths
But during that winter something else happened. Men began to die.
The first was John Torrington, a 20-year-old leading stoker aboard HMS Terror. He died on 1 January 1846. A few days later John Hartnell, an able seaman aboard HMS Erebus, died. Then, in April, Royal Marine William Braine became the expedition’s third fatality.
They were buried beside the shore. Those were the three graves we could now see from the Zodiac.
At the time, three deaths amongst 129 men during an Arctic winter probably wouldn’t have suggested the scale of the catastrophe to come. When summer returned and the ice opened, Franklin’s expedition sailed away from Beechey Island. The graves remained behind. For two years virtually nothing was heard from the expedition. Back in Britain concern gradually increased, although Franklin had expected to be away for several years and his absence wasn’t initially regarded as alarming.
Eventually search expeditions began heading north.
In 1850, searchers reached Beechey Island and made an extraordinary discovery. There was unmistakable evidence that Franklin’s expedition had wintered here. There were camps, artifacts, a cairn and three graves. But there was one enormous problem. There was no clear message explaining where Franklin had gone next.
The searchers had discovered where the expedition had been, but they still had almost no idea where it had gone.
What followed became an enormous international search. Britain sent expedition after expedition into the Arctic. American searchers joined them. Private expeditions were financed, and Franklin’s formidable wife, Lady Jane Franklin, campaigned tirelessly and helped fund further attempts to discover what had happened to her husband and his men.
Beechey Island consequently became a natural base for many of the search parties. For a period in the early 1850s it was effectively a meeting place for expeditions searching for Franklin, and those searches resulted in the exploration and mapping of huge areas of the Canadian Arctic.
In one of the great ironies of exploration history, the disappearance of an expedition searching for the Northwest Passage stimulated far more exploration than Franklin’s original voyage.
The remains around Beechey Island are therefore not all connected directly with Franklin. Later search expeditions left their own archaeological footprint.
One of the most interesting is Northumberland House, built as a supply depot and emergency refuge. Food, fuel and equipment could be stored there in case Franklin’s men – or the expeditions looking for them – somehow reached Beechey Island in desperate need of supplies.
Only ruins remain today. For us, Northumberland House acquired an entirely different significance because that was where our polar bear was heading. We watched her swim across the bay towards the site, linking the wildlife and human history of Beechey Island in a way no planned itinerary ever could.
There are other reminders of the enormous Franklin search effort beneath these waters. HMS Breadalbane, a supply ship supporting the search, was crushed by ice and sank nearby in 1853. Beechey Island consequently became almost an archaeological archive of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration.
Gradually, evidence about Franklin began appearing much farther south, and some of the most important information didn’t come from European searchers at all.
Inuit Reveal The Truth About The Expedition
It came from Inuit. Inuit hunters had seen ships and groups of white men travelling through the region. They found abandoned equipment, encountered survivors and knew stories about where ships had sunk.
In 1854, explorer John Rae obtained Inuit testimony describing a group of starving Europeans who had died while travelling south. The accounts included disturbing evidence that some of the men had resorted to cannibalism.
Victorian Britain was horrified and many refused to believe it. Yet Inuit testimony proved remarkably accurate.
Then, in 1859, a search expedition led by Francis Leopold McClintock discovered the crucial written evidence in a cairn on King William Island. The document became known as the Victory Point Note. It contained two messages. The first, written in May 1847, was reassuring. The ships had wintered at Beechey Island in 1845–46 and had subsequently become trapped in ice off King William Island. Everything, it reported, was well.
Somebody later returned to the note and added another message. The situation had become catastrophic. Franklin had died on 11 June 1847. By April 1848, nine officers and fifteen men were dead. Erebus and Terror remained trapped in the ice. The 105 survivors abandoned the ships on 22 April 1848 and attempted to travel south towards the Back River. None survived.
Even that discovery left one enormous part of the mystery unresolved. Nobody knew exactly where Erebus and Terror were. For more than 150 years the ships remained amongst the most famous missing wrecks in the world. Searches continued, and once again Inuit knowledge repeatedly pointed towards the answer. Generations of Inuit testimony contained accounts of ships and wrecks in the region around King William Island.
Modern researchers increasingly combined that traditional knowledge with historical records, archaeology, hydrographic surveying and sonar.
HMS Erebus and HMS Terror are Found
Then, in 2014, the wreck of HMS Erebus was found. Two years later HMS Terror was located. The discoveries were an important reminder that the Franklin story shouldn’t be viewed solely as a tale of heroic British exploration. Inuit knowledge of the region proved fundamental to understanding what had happened and ultimately helped researchers locate the missing ships.
Why all 129 members of Franklin’s expedition eventually died remains more complicated. There was probably no single cause. Cold, exhaustion, malnutrition and disease almost certainly contributed. Scurvy has long been discussed, while tuberculosis and other illnesses affected members of the crew. Lead exposure became another famous theory following scientific examination of the bodies buried on Beechey Island, although the significance of lead poisoning in the overall disaster remains debated.
Perhaps the greatest problem was simply the Arctic itself.
The ships became trapped in ice and stayed trapped. Food supplies deteriorated. Men became weaker. Eventually the survivors attempted an almost unimaginable journey on foot through one of the harshest environments on Earth. By the time they abandoned their ships, 24 men were already dead.
The three Beechey Island graves have given scientists an extraordinary window into those events. Because the ground remains permanently frozen, the bodies were remarkably well preserved. During scientific investigations in the 1980s, the graves of Torrington, Hartnell and Braine were carefully exhumed before the men were reburied.
Their preservation was astonishing. Faces, hair and clothing survived. The resulting photographs are haunting because suddenly the Franklin expedition stops being simply a Victorian adventure story.
These were real people. Young men who left home expecting to return. John Torrington was only twenty. Perhaps that is why I had imagined that standing beside the graves would be one of the defining moments of our visit to Beechey Island. But the Arctic had other ideas.
Instead, we floated offshore in a Zodiac, looking towards the graves through the cold air while somewhere nearby a female polar bear made her way towards Northumberland House. In some ways, that seemed entirely appropriate. Franklin and every explorer who came after him had their plans changed by this environment. We arrived with modern clothing, satellite navigation, radios, weather forecasting, powerful expedition ships, Zodiacs and sea kayaks made from materials Franklin couldn’t possibly have imagined.
And a single polar bear still stopped us going ashore.
Our wildlife encounters weren’t quite finished either. As we travelled towards the entrance to Erebus and Terror Bay, somebody spotted tiny black dots high on the distant hillside. Through binoculars they resolved themselves into five musk oxen.
They were a long way away, little more than shapes against the enormous slopes, but it was another reminder of how deceptive scale can be in the High Arctic. Animals that are huge when seen close up can become tiny specks in this landscape.
Then came one final Arctic sighting – a distant flash of pure white in the water.
A beluga whale. Again, it wasn’t close. There was no dramatic encounter alongside the Zodiac, just a distant glimpse of an unmistakably white whale moving through the Arctic sea. Yet somehow it fitted the day perfectly: polar bear, musk oxen and beluga, all encountered around one of the most historically important locations in the Canadian Arctic.
There is another important part of Beechey Island’s story that can easily be overlooked. Its human history didn’t begin when Franklin arrived. Archaeological evidence demonstrates Indigenous use of this landscape long before nineteenth-century British explorers began trying to map routes through the Arctic Archipelago.
People had travelled, hunted and survived in this environment for generations before Franklin arrived with his ships. Inuit knowledge would later provide crucial evidence about what happened to his expedition and eventually contribute to the discovery of the wrecks.
That makes Beechey Island part of a much bigger story. It is about exploration and survival, but also about different ways of understanding the Arctic and what happens when outsiders underestimate one of the most challenging environments on Earth.
I had expected our visit to Beechey Island to be dominated by Franklin. I had imagined kayaking beneath its low shoreline, landing on the beach and eventually standing quietly beside the graves of Torrington, Hartnell and Braine.
None of that happened. Instead, the fog lifted just enough to reveal a polar bear. We watched her from our Zodiac, saw her enter the sea and swim across towards Northumberland House. We cruised offshore and looked at the three graves from the water. Later we picked out five musk oxen as tiny black dots on a distant hillside and caught a glimpse of a white beluga whale. And perhaps that made the experience even more memorable.
Beechey Island isn’t a museum. It isn’t a carefully controlled historic site separated from the landscape around it. It remains part of the High Arctic – exposed to weather, ice and wildlife, just as it was when Franklin arrived here in 1845.
Parks Canada designated the wider Beechey Island archaeological complex a National Historic Site in 1993, specifically recognising both Franklin’s winter camp and the island’s later role as the great gathering point for expeditions searching for him.
Why not take the opportunity to read our other blogs about Nunavut and the Canadian arctic;
- Kayaking with Arctic Wildlife: Staying Safe Around Polar Bears, Walrus and Whales
- Croker Bay: Paddling Beneath the Glaciers of Devon Island
- Dundas Harbour: Ghosts in the Fog on Devon Island
- Duart Bay: Sea Kayaking into a Scottish Corner of Baffin Island
- Isabella Bay: In the Realm of the Bowhead Whale
- Qikiqtarjuaq: Gateway to the Wild Mountains of Baffin Island
- Port Leopold: Paddling Through the Search for Franklin
- Prince Leopold Island: Paddling Beneath a City of Seabirds
- Radstock Bay: Paddling Through a Thousand Years of Arctic History