The Comfort of Protocol

The gap between institutional response and Arctic reality was already visible to those who knew how to look, and it would widen with every season that passed without news.

In the Admiralty boardroom at Whitehall, on a morning in late July 1848, a clerk laid a memorandum before the Board. The paper bore no urgent markings, no red wax, no personal signature of alarm. A routine document, the kind that crossed that table a dozen times a week, its language was the language of institutional habit.

The clerk had compiled it from the records of every British polar expedition since Parry’s first voyage in 1819, a column of figures showing what every hydrographer in the room already knew: expeditions provisioned for three years were expected to return, if not by the expiry of that term, then within a reasonable margin thereafter. The Erebus and Terror had sailed in May 1845. The three-year mark had fallen in the spring. The margin—six months, perhaps eight—was what the Admiralty had been waiting for. Now, in the summer of 1848, the margin had elapsed.

The minute recorded what the protocol demanded. The duty of the Board had been triggered not by sighting of wreckage, nor message, nor word from Inuit hunters, but by the completion of a bureaucratic cycle. The search for Franklin would begin because a calendar had ticked to its appointed hour. This comfort of protocol transformed uncertainty into manageable sequence, each report containing its own internal logic, pushing the actual Arctic toward the margins of the file.

*

Three hundred miles north, in the drawing room of a house in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, Eleanor Franklin received visitors who came to offer consolation she had not requested. Her husband had been gone for three years and two months. The Admiralty’s public position remained that no news was not yet bad news, but the private correspondence of Arctic veterans had begun to circulate more freely among the families.

Sir John Richardson, who had survived the disaster of John Franklin’s first overland expedition in 1819–1822, wrote to her in terms that she found both comforting and strange. He spoke of excellent arrangements aboard the ships, of ample provisions, of scientific equipment that would sustain the men through any ordinary difficulty.

Yet his letters also contained calculations. He knew, as she did, what three years meant in the Arctic.

He had eaten his boots on the Coppermine River. He had watched companions die of starvation while waiting for rescue that came too late.

Eleanor Franklin’s response to these visits was measured. She had married a man who had already buried one wife, who had left children behind on previous voyages, who had accepted that exploration demanded ruthlessness toward domestic life. She did not weep in company. She asked her visitors for details: the exact latitude of the last sighting, the tonnage of the supply ships that had accompanied the expedition to Whalefish Islands, the names of the officers who had remained in Baffin Bay when Erebus and Terror turned west into Lancaster Sound. She was assembling her own file, parallel to the Admiralty’s, and where the official version offered the comfort of protocol, hers offered the possibility of action.

In August 1847, she had written requesting that a search expedition be sent. The reply had been courteous and definitive: the ships were provisioned for three years; no grounds for anxiety existed. She had kept the letter.

The gap between these two registers—official calm and private calculation—was where the Franklin search would take shape. Not yet a public movement. The newspapers had carried nothing beyond initial reports of departure and brief notices from whaling captains who had seen the ships in Baffin Bay. The Illustrated London News had published a woodcut of Erebus and Terror leaving Greenhithe, their steam funnels prominent against the Kentish sky, but there had been no follow-up, no series of anxious dispatches, no mounting chorus of editorial concern. The public that would later make Franklin’s fate a national obsession was, in the summer of 1848, still occupied with other matters: the revolutions in Europe, the Chartist demonstrations in London, the potato blight that had begun to empty Ireland. The Arctic was far, and silent, and had not yet produced evidence that could break through the noise of nearer catastrophes.

*

In the Hydrographic Office, the charts told their own story. The last confirmed position of Franklin’s ships had been recorded by Captain Robert Martin of the whaler Enterprise, who had spoken with them on 26 July 1845 in the middle of Baffin Bay. The coordinates were approximate—approximately 74°15’N, 68°10’W—but fixed enough to establish a starting point for any search. The problem was direction.

Franklin’s orders, which remained sealed in the Admiralty’s safe, authorized him to proceed through Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait toward the known position of Parry’s furthest west, then to explore southward through any channel that promised connection with the Pacific. But the Admiralty had also granted him discretion to modify this route based on ice conditions, and the ice conditions of 1845 were unknown. The whalers who had seen him had reported unusually open water. The whalers who had not seen him in 1846 and 1847 had reported nothing at all, because few had gone as far north as Baffin Bay in those years.

The chart showed a coastline that was largely conjectural beyond 92°W, a blank space labeled “Unknown” that covered thousands of square miles where two ships and 129 men might be wintering, or sinking, or walking.

James Clark Ross knew this coastline better than any living British officer. He had commanded Erebus through the Antarctic ice between 1839 and 1843, discovering the Ross Sea and the Victoria Land coast, establishing the position of the south magnetic pole. He had been Franklin’s confidant, consulted on the outfitting of the ships, present at the final dinners before departure. He had also, crucially, been the commander of the last major British search expedition, sent in 1848 not to find Franklin but to locate Sir John Richardson’s overland party, which had itself been sent to search for Franklin in 1847. The layering was already becoming complex: searches to find searches, expeditions launched to relieve expeditions that had been launched to relieve the original voyage. Ross understood this structure. He had operated within it before.

On 24 August 1848, the Admiralty’s orders reached him at his home in Ilchester Place, Brompton. The document authorized him to proceed with HMS Enterprise and HMS Investigator to Lancaster Sound, there to make every possible inquiry as to the fate of Franklin’s expedition. The phrasing was identical to that used in previous search authorizations, going back to the instructions given to John Ross in 1829 and Parry in 1827. The Navy had a template for this kind of operation, and it was being applied with the same meticulous attention to precedent that governed every other aspect of Admiralty business.

Ross was to take on board additional provisions, including preserved meats, pemmican, and lime juice, to establish depots at strategic points along his route, and to return no later than October 1849 unless he had obtained positive intelligence of Franklin’s position. The time limit was itself a product of protocol: search expeditions were not permitted to risk their own destruction in the attempt to prevent destruction elsewhere. The calculus of rescue had its own cold mathematics.

*

The provisioning of Enterprise and Investigator began immediately at Deptford and Woolwich, the same yards where Erebus and Terror had been fitted out three years before. The ships were not new. Enterprise had been built as a bomb vessel in 1824 and had seen service in the Mediterranean; Investigator was a converted storeship, smaller and slower than her consort. Neither carried steam engines. The technology that had been considered essential for Franklin’s penetration of the Northwest Passage—screw propellers, auxiliary power, iron hull plating—had been omitted from the rescue mission on grounds of economy and speed of preparation. The Admiralty’s Arctic timetable did not permit the delays that proper fitting would require. Ross would sail with sails alone, into waters where Franklin had been equipped to steam through ice.

This decision was not questioned in the boardroom. The operational doctrine that governed Arctic service had been developed through decades of experience with sailing vessels, and that experience suggested that what mattered most was not propulsion but provisions. Ross’s ships were loaded with three years’ stores, the same allowance that had been given to Franklin, on the assumption that any search expedition must be prepared to become itself the object of search.

The symmetry was deliberate: the rescuers would replicate the conditions of the lost, as if the Arctic were a machine that processed identical inputs into identical fates. The possibility that Franklin’s steam engines might have enabled him to reach positions inaccessible to sailing ships, or that they might have broken down and stranded him in consequence, was noted in the margins of the planning documents and then set aside. The protocol allowed for no deviation based on technological speculation.

In the warehouses along the Thames, the same contractors who had supplied Franklin’s expedition assembled the familiar components: pemmican from the American frontier, preserved meats from Goldner’s patent process, compressed vegetables, chocolate, tobacco, medicinal spirits. Each item was checked against the standard lists, each cask marked with the broad arrow of government property. The work proceeded with the efficiency of long practice, for the Navy had been sending ships to the Arctic for thirty years, and the suppliers had learned to anticipate its requirements. What they could not anticipate was the destination. Ross’s orders named Lancaster Sound as his objective, but they also authorized him to explore any other route or direction that seemed promising based on information gathered during his voyage. The blank space on the chart was officially acknowledged as a zone of discretion, where the commander on the spot would determine the search pattern.

*

James Fitzjames had written to his family from Greenland in July 1845, describing the ships’ progress and his own satisfaction with the voyage so far. The letter had been carried home by the supply vessel Baretto Junior, along with similar dispatches from other officers, and it had arrived in England in the autumn of that year.

Now, three years later, those letters were being re-read in drawing rooms across the country, their optimistic phrases taking on the weight of last words.

Fitzjames had been second lieutenant of Erebus at departure, promoted to commander during the voyage, and finally—after Franklin’s death in June 1847—to captain of the ship and second-in-command of the expedition under Captain Francis Crozier of HMS Terror. His career traced the arc that the Admiralty’s protocol was designed to protect: the promising officer, distinguished service in Mesopotamia and China before his Arctic appointment, steady advancement through merit and connection. His mother kept his letters in a japanned box.

The families were learning to live with a particular kind of silence. The Admiralty’s position, communicated through formal letters and newspaper notices, was that no conclusion could be drawn from absence. The Arctic was large, communication was uncertain, and ships wintering in ice were by definition unable to send messages. True enough.

It was also true that previous expeditions had found ways to communicate: cairns on headlands, messages in cylinders, Inuit intermediaries carrying oral reports to the nearest trading post. The absence of any such communication from Franklin’s party was, among those who knew the Arctic, a source of private concern that the official position could not quite dispel. Sir John Richardson wrote to the Hydrographer in February 1847, noting that the non-arrival of any tidings from Sir John Franklin’s expedition was beginning to cause some anxiety among his friends. The Hydrographer’s reply has not survived, but the Admiralty’s public position remained unchanged for another eighteen months.

*

The protocol finally triggered in the summer of 1848 was not designed to address anxiety but to manage it—to transform uncertainty into procedure and give the appearance of action without risking premature commitment. From this perspective the three-year silence that preceded it was not negligence but the necessary operation of a system that weighted certainty over speed and precedent over improvisation; institutional reputation over individual fate. The Admiralty had sent ships too early before and been criticized for expense; it had sent them too late and been criticized for result. Its calendar of expectation served as defense against both errors: a neutral mechanism distributing responsibility across time and across all members present at any given meeting.

James Clark Ross received his final instructions on 30 August 1848. He was to proceed to the west coast of Greenland, establish contact with the Danish authorities at Godhavn, and then enter Lancaster Sound no later than the first week of August 1849—nearly a year hence, given the time required for the Atlantic passage and the necessity of waiting for the ice to break. The delay was built into the plan: Ross could not reach the search area before the navigation season of 1849, and he could not remain there beyond the navigation season of 1850. His window was narrow, his resources finite, his authority constrained by the requirement to report regularly and to avoid any unnecessary risk to his own ships and men. The search for Franklin was, by these terms, a secondary mission. The primary mission was to return with information, whether that information included Franklin or not.

On 12 May 1848, before Ross’s expedition had even been authorized, another search had already sailed from New York. A wealthy merchant with no naval experience but with a fascination for Arctic exploration had purchased two ships and offered them to his government for a rescue mission. The offer had been accepted, and the ships had been placed under the command of a naval lieutenant, with a volunteer crew that included a young surgeon named Elisha Kent Kane. This American expedition carried no official connection to the British Admiralty, but its existence was noted in Whitehall with a mixture of appreciation and embarrassment. A foreign power was acting where Britain had delayed. The protocol that governed British operations had no American equivalent.

The merchant’s motivation was personal as well as philanthropic. He had been moved by the plight of the families, by the silence that seemed to him intolerable, by the national prestige that he believed would attach to American participation in a British cause. His ships were less well equipped than Ross’s, his officers less experienced, his chances of success—by any rational calculation—minimal. But he had acted, and the contrast between his expedition and the Admiralty’s careful preparations would not be lost on the British public when both ventures became known. The comfort of protocol was beginning to generate its own discomfort.

*

In the weeks before Ross’s departure, the Admiralty received a series of reports that tested its operational doctrine more directly. Whalers returning from Davis Strait brought no news of Franklin, but they brought news of ice: heavy, unbroken, extending further south than in any recent year. The masters spoke of conditions that would make Lancaster Sound impassable, of seasons when no ship could penetrate the barrier that guarded the approach to the Northwest Passage. These reports were entered in the Hydrographic Office’s files, cross-referenced with previous observations, incorporated into the growing body of data that would eventually produce the Admiralty’s Arctic Pilot. They were not allowed to modify the search plan. Ross’s orders assumed that he would reach Lancaster Sound; the possibility that he might not, that the ice itself might defeat the protocol before it could be executed, was not formally acknowledged.

The ships were ready by early September 1848. Enterprise and Investigator lay at Woolwich, their holds packed with the three-year allowance, their crews mustered and inspected, their captains—Ross and Richard Collinson, his second-in-command—briefed on the route and the objectives. The final delay was caused not by provisioning but by politics. The Admiralty wished to coordinate its departure with the government of Denmark, which administered Greenland, and to ensure that the American expedition would not be perceived as having preempted British action. The search for Franklin was becoming a matter of national prestige, and prestige required choreography. Ross was instructed to delay his sailing until the diplomatic arrangements were complete.

He used the time to study the charts, to interview whaling captains, to assemble every scrap of information that might guide his search. He knew, as the Admiralty knew, that his chances of finding Franklin alive were diminishing with every week that passed. The three-year provision allowance was a theoretical maximum, not a practical guarantee. Men died in the Arctic from causes that provisions could not prevent: scurvy, exposure, accidents, the psychological collapse that led to wandering into snowstorms. Ross had seen it himself in the Antarctic, where his own crews had suffered despite adequate supplies and competent leadership. He did not speak of these possibilities in his official correspondence, but his private journal—preserved in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society—records his awareness that he was sailing toward a disaster that had already occurred.

*

The departure finally took place on 20 September 1848, more than a month after the original target date. Ross stood on the quarterdeck of Enterprise as the ships cleared the Nore and shaped course for the north, watching the Kentish coast diminish behind him. He was fifty-eight years old, at the height of his reputation, sailing into what he must have known was the last major expedition of his career. The orders in his cabin directed him to proceed to Lancaster Sound, to search for Franklin, to return with news. They did not direct him to find survivors. The protocol that had generated this mission had never promised that outcome, and Ross, who understood the Arctic as well as any man alive, cannot have expected it.

The ships made their way up the Atlantic through the autumn gales, touching at the Shetlands for final provisions, then pushing north toward the ice edge that marked the boundary of navigable water. They were following, roughly, the route that Franklin had taken three years before, but in reverse season: where he had sailed in the optimism of spring, they sailed in the gathering darkness of an Arctic winter. Ross’s plan required him to reach Greenland before the ice closed, to winter at Godhavn or Upernavik, to enter Lancaster Sound at the earliest possible moment in 1849. The calendar of expectation still governed his movements, but the calendar of the Arctic was indifferent to Admiralty planning.

In London, the machinery of official concern continued to operate. The Admiralty issued periodic notices to the press, assuring the public that every possible exertion was being made for Franklin’s relief. Lady Jane Franklin, who had succeeded her predecessor as the expedition’s most persistent advocate, maintained a correspondence with the Board that grew in volume and intensity as the months passed. She was not satisfied with Ross’s mission, which she considered insufficient and improperly directed; she wanted ships sent to the Bering Strait, to the Mackenzie River, to any point where Franklin might have emerged from the ice. Her letters were courteous, detailed, and unanswerable in their documentation of the search’s limitations. The Admiralty replied with equal courtesy, citing the operational doctrine that confined its resources to the most probable route, the route that Franklin’s own orders had designated as his primary objective.

The distance between institutional response and Arctic reality was now being measured in thousands of miles. While Ross wintered in Greenland, while Enterprise and Investigator lay frozen in their harbors, the events that would define Franklin’s fate were proceeding in a silence that no search could penetrate. On King William Island, if any of Franklin’s men still lived, they were preparing for a third winter in the ice, or a fourth, or preparing to abandon their ships and walk south toward a rescue that would not come. The Victory Point note, which would eventually record their final known position, had not yet been written. The graves on Beechey Island, where three of their companions already lay, were still unmarked by any searcher’s eye. The Inuit hunters who would later provide the only testimony of their final days were hunting seals on coastlines that no European ship had visited.

The comfort of protocol had produced its necessary consequence: a search expedition authorized, equipped, and dispatched according to every rule of naval operation, sailing toward a catastrophe that had completed itself before the first ship left its moorings. The quiet dispatch of Ross’s ships into the Arctic void was not a rescue mission but the next movement in a bureaucratic cycle, a transfer of anxiety from the waiting families to the active commander, from the static uncertainty of absence to the dynamic uncertainty of search. What it would find, when it finally reached the waters where Franklin had been, was not yet determined.

But the shape of the search itself—the institutions that generated it, the timetables that governed it, the protocols that transformed human desperation into administrative routine—was now fixed, and would persist through every subsequent expedition, every subsequent disappointment, every subsequent discovery of what the ice had kept.