Thoreau and the Lost Expedition

 "Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes - with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."

-- Henry David Thoreau, from the final chapter of Walden

As the footnote in the Norton edition will dutifully inform you, this is an allusion to a stack of empty food tins found in 1850 on the remote shores of Beechey Island in the Canadian Arctic by searchers looking for the lost Arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin, which seemed to have vanished amidst the ice sometime after it had sailed five years earlier. The tinned food was among the supplies on board his two ships, the Erebus and Terror, and marked the site of where the expedition had spent its first winter.

Thoreau, of course, was only using the search for Franklin as a synecdoche of the futility of all such enterprises, and as a contrast to the exploration of one's own interior "higher latitudes" -- and yet, by the very vividness of his metaphors, he undercut his own message. Why, after all, would Thoreau even know of these cans, or of Mr. Grinnell (who had funded the American search that year), had he not troubled to look at the newspapers, and been following the accounts of these discoveries as avidly as any other reader of his day? He very probably read about the cans, and saw the above illustration of them, in the Boston Evening Transcript.

Indeed, there's ample evidence in Thoreau's well-documented life that his interest in Arctic exploration far predated Walden, and seems to have been lifelong. In April of 1837, at the age of nineteen, Thoreau checked out George Back's Narrative of the Arctic land expedition to the mouth of the Great Fish River from the Concord Library. Back was a close friend of Franklin's, and had accompanied him on an earlier expedition in the 1820's. Thoreau apparently followed many such expeditions in the press, and in 1855 remarked to Emerson that, on that earlier trek -- on which many of the party's hired French-Canadian voyageurs died of starvation, that Franklin and his companions had "outlived their robuster comrades by more intellect." In 1856, he eagerly perused a list of Arctic plants made by Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, who commanded a second Grinnell expedition the year before, which a friend had obtained from Kane while visiting Boston the week before.

The Franklin expedition mystery long outlasted him -- its ships were not found until 2014 and 2016 -- and even to this day continues to inspire archaeologists and historians as much as it does ordinary people; the air of uncertainty surrounding his fate has been fodder for novelists from Jules Verne to Margaret Atwood, and was the basis for the 2018 AMC series The Terror. I've made my own modest contribution to this story, and there's now a Facebook group devoted to it that claims more than 3,000 members.

Curious? I've placed the first chapter of my book online here for your perusal.