Doomed Passage

Edwin Landseer’s oil painting Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864) luridly expresses how Sir John Franklin’s contemporaries felt about his doomed expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Two polar bears hunch in the wreckage of a vessel strewn across the ice. One sinks its teeth into a tattered Red Ensign; the other rises from feeding on a sailor’s whitened rib cage. Landseer’s desolate scene is otherwise devoid of people: the bears are the agents and only witnesses of God’s judgment on hubris.

In reality, the slow death of Franklin and his crew took place under the eyes of Indigenous communities in what became Nunavut. Less than a decade after his disappearance in 1845, Inuit had brought to the explorer John Rae relics from the expedition, along with reports of cannibalized corpses. Franklin’s widow and her ally Charles Dickens fiercely rebutted their testimony, but as the...