Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/202

 induction, comprise the sum of all that can be known. The paper, which was one of the official forms issued to be left for transmission by any casual finder, had been in the first instance filled up in the customary manner, but carelessly and with a wrong date: ‘28 May 1847—H.M. ships Erebus and Terror wintered in the ice in lat. 70° 05߱′N., long. 98° 23߱ W. Having wintered in 1846–7 [a mistake for 1845–6] at Beechey Island in lat. 74° 43߱′28″ N., long. 91° 39߱′15″ W., after having ascended Wellington Channel to lat. 77° and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well. …’ In 1846 they proceeded to the south-west, and eventually reached within twelve miles of the north extreme of King William's Land, when their progress was arrested by the approaching winter; and there they remained. The rest of the story was written on the margin of the same form by Captain Fitzjames: ‘25 April 1848—H.M. ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on 22 April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12 Sept. 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69° 37߱ 42″ N., long. 98° 41߱ W. Sir John Franklin died on 11 June 1847, and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.’ To which was added, in Crozier's writing, ‘and start on to-morrow, 26th, for Back's Fish River.’ And this was all. From the Eskimos McClintock learned that one of the ships sank in deep water, and that, to their grief, they got nothing from her; the other, much broken, was forced on shore, and from her they obtained the wood and iron which he saw in their possession. But there was no further news of the men. It was too certain that every soul of the party perished miserably; some earlier on King William's Land; some ‘falling down and dying as they walked,’ as an old woman told McClintock; many on the mainland by the Great Fish River. Most fortunate then in his end was Franklin, who died before this terrible fate fell on his men; died, proud in the consciousness of having seen, even if he had not fully travelled over the north-west passage, the strait separating King William's Land from Victoria Land; the strait which, if the ice would have permitted, would have led him into the known waters already explored by Dease and Simpson.

Since the finding of this written record Franklin has been recognised as the discoverer of the north-west passage, and is so styled on the pedestal of the statue to his memory erected at the public cost in Waterloo Place, London. This statue ‘gives a tolerably faithful representation of him.’ There are other statues at Hobart Town and Spilsby. A portrait painted by T. Phillips, R.A., about the time of his first marriage, has been photographed. Another portrait by John Jackson, R.A., lent by Mr. John Murray, was exhibited in the loan exhibition at South Kensington in 1868. Another portrait by Derby is engraved for Jerdan's ‘National Portrait Gallery’ (vol. ii.), and there is a capital lithograph by Negelen. A monument in Westminster Abbey, erected by his widow, was uncovered a fortnight after her death in 1875.

Franklin was a man not only of iron resolution and indomitable courage, but of a singular geniality, uprightness, and simplicity, which kindled into the warmest affection his influence over his comrades and subordinates. He left but one child, the daughter of his first wife. She married in 1849 the Rev. John Philip Gell, the head of an old Derbyshire family, who, as a young man, had been selected by Dr. Arnold's advice to be principal of the college in Hobart Town, and was long rector of Buxted in Sussex. Mrs. Gell died in 1860, leaving several children.

[Marshall's Roy. Nav. Biog. ix. (vol. iii. pt. i.) 1; O'Byrne's Nav. Biog. Dict.; Encycl. Brit. 7th and 8th editions; Richardson's Polar Regions; Sherard Osborn's Career, Last Voyage, and Fate of Sir John Franklin: this was originally published in Once a Week (October and November 1859), was afterwards republished separately, and is here referred to in the first volume of Admiral Osborn's Collected Works (1865); a Brave Man and his Belongings, printed in 1874 for private circulation: it is addressed by a niece of the first Mrs. Franklin to Franklin's grand-children and grand nephews or nieces; Beechey's Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole in H.M. ships Dorothea and Trent; Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the years 1819–22 by John Franklin (4to, 1823); Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the years 1825–7, by John Franklin (4to, 1828); Report of the Committee appointed by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to inquire into and report on the recent Arctic Expeditions in search of Sir John Franklin (fol. 1851); Papers relative to the recent Arctic Expeditions in search of Sir John Franklin and the crews of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror (fol. 1854); Further Papers relative to the recent Arctic Expeditions in search of Sir John Franklin (fol. 1855); McClintock's Narrative of the Discovery of the fate of Sir John Franklin and his Companions.] 

FRANKLIN, ROBERT (1630–1684), nonconformist divine, was born in London 16 July 1630. In his ninth year he went into Suffolk to live with an aunt, and in