Lady Franklin’s Lament and The Northwest Passage

Sir John Franklin was an English explorer who disappeared with his crew and ships in 1845 searching for the Northwest Passage. There have been 4 Jeopardy! clues about him. They don’t expect you to know who he was. They tell you and want to know what he was looking for.

My interest in this story has always been through a folk song “Lady Franklin’s Lament.” It is told through a dream a sailor has about Lady Franklin’s grief after her husband’s disappearance.

These are the lines that I’ve always found so tragic:

In Baffin’s Bay where the whalefish blows
Is the fate of Franklin no one knows
10,000 pounds I would freely give
To learn that my husband still will live
And to bring him back to the land of life
Where once again I could be his wife
I’d give all the wealth that I e’er shall have
But I think, alas, he has found the grave

Indeed, even when Lady Franklin had given up hope that he might still survive, she financed expeditions to find out what happened to him and his crew and his ships, the Erebus and Terror.

Now it seems that there is at least one person who thinks that the terrible grief conveyed in the folk song was manufactured. In his 2005 book “Lady Franklin’s Revenge,” author Ken McGoogan believes that ambition was Lady Franklin’s motivation because she was “denied a role in Victorian England’s male-dominated society.” He also describes Lord Franklin as a fat imbecile and their marriage so cold that perhaps Franklin may have preferred death in the Arctic to returning to Jane Franklin! Sometimes you hate to have your illusions shattered, so I guess I’ll file that under “things I wish I never saw.”

Atlas Obscura has a great article about Lady Franklin if you want to learn more about how the expeditions that she funded resulted in many discoveries. This article doesn’t mention Dr. John Rae but I found an 1881 article in “The Book of Days” that says Dr. Rae was awarded 10,000 pounds by the British government in 1856 for finding strong proof, albeit circumstantial, that Franklin and some of his crew had “found the grave.” It also says that Captain McClintock was awarded 6,000 pounds for completing the investigation in 1858 and 1895, and establishing firm proof.

Other notes of interest: Some folks feel that Bob Dylan learned the tune of “Lady Franklin’s Lament” from Paul Clayton, and turned it into “Bob Dylan’s Dream” — just like he did with “Don’t Think Twice”

“Northwest Passage” is a popular song in Canada that mentions Sir John Franklin