Sunday, April 03, 2005

The File: Unravelling The Franklin Mystery

It is interesting that the men seen on the march at Teekeenu had common native names--indeed, it is surprising that they had any native names at all. The leaders Toolooa and Aglooka could have acquired their Inuit names on previous voyages, but most of Franklin's officers had no experience in the north. Gilder concluded that it was probable that the names which the white men used phonetically resembled the Inuit names. If we look at the crew lists of the Erebus and Terror (appendix 1), it is hard to verify this. No men with names that sound like Aglooka or Toolooa leap from the page in the manner of "Ill-kern"/Pilkington or "Oolizhen"/Allison. However, it should be remembered that Stefansson found that even after repeated coaching the Inuit pronounced "Jim" as "Perk" or "Zerk" and that to them "Rae" sounded just like "Nerk"!
-- David C. Woodman, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony, pp. 197

Mr. Woodman's book is an open-minded examination of the Inuit testimony and tradition regarding the Franklin expedition, the greatest disaster in the entire history of European polar exploration. Over the years the testimony of the native people of this region has been largely overlooked, in part due to the difficulty of deciphering the sometimes contradictory tales. To his credit, Mr. Woodman thoroughly investigates the possibility of Inuit confusion with other European expeditions in the same geographic area, while highlighting the elements that could only pertain to Franklin's doomed men. I found his argument that Capt. Crozier died relatively early, in 1849 or 1850, and that the mysterious "Aglooka" must necessarily be a surviving junior officer, to be particularly convincing. Nevertheless, given the disparate and contradictory details stated in the Inuit tales, it looks as though the only chance for a real breakthrough in this long-standing riddle must lie in the discovery of one of the lost ships, or of a hitherto-unknown cache of written records from the expedition.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book, therefore, is chapter 18, "Keeweewoo". Here Mr. Woodman discusses the possibility that one of the Franklin ships sank near Kirkwall Island or O'Reilly Island in Utjulik. In recent years Mr. Woodman has been a member of several expeditions to the area searching for the lost ship, most recently in 2004. It appears that the theory that the ship sank at Grant Island has been discounted due to a lack of confirmatory sonar or magnetic evidence. Nevertheless, the proliferation of suggestive artifacts in the region of O'Reilly Island is encouraging. We wonder if any further information is available regarding the "three stone cairns" that may be located in Kirkwall Island (p. 268)?

Amid all the geographical confusion and contradictory reports of relics, artifacts, and cairns, one of the particular and humanizing details is the carved or painted hands that members of the Franklin expedition often used in directional signs and notes. These were found at the winter camp at Beechey Island (p. 69), which date from before tragedy struck. Presumably later examples were found at Cape Felix: "a piece of paper with a carefully drawn hand upon it, the index finger pointing at the time in a southerly direction" (p. 88), and at "Shar-too" on King William's Island, where an Inuit hunter found a carved wooden hand placed at the top of a cairn (p. 89). These hands served as markers, helping to guide Franklin expedition members in conditions of blizzard, fog, and Arctic night. And they point the way for the explorers of today, who share the enduring fascination of the expedition's fate.

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