Lady Jane Franklin would be thrilled to be told of the discovery of HMS Erebus, the ship on which her husband, John Franklin, disappeared in 1845 while searching for the Northwest Passage. She would read Franklin’s Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus with avid interest because, like the authors John Geiger and Alanna Mitchell, she believed that Franklin’s legacy should serve as a lesson to a patriotic country. As she wrote to her prime minister in 1859, the 129 men who died on the expedition “have laid down their lives … in the service of their country, as truly as if they had perished by the rifle, the cannon-ball, or the bayonet.” Franklin’s Lost Ship elevates the Franklin disaster to a national success story in a narrative sympathetic to the Victorian imperial visions of Franklin’s day. What Lady Franklin would be puzzled by, of course, is that the country in question is Canada and not Britain.
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Adriana Craciun is University of California Presidential Chair at the University of California, Riverside, and Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on the history of Arctic exploration and is the author of Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
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