The Weight of a Spoon

Why would starving men carry silver? In October 1854, a correspondent to The Times offered that objection to John Rae's news from the Arctic. If Sir John Franklin's sailors had abandoned their ships and were struggling to survive, surely they would have left room for food rather than forks, spoons and plates.

Rae answered with an estimate of the load. The recovered forks and spoons, he wrote, could weigh no more than four or five pounds in all. Shared among forty men, that was hardly an overwhelming burden. The small plate bearing Franklin's name might weigh half an ounce. Rae also knew how readily people leaving a ship carried things less useful than eating utensils.

The correspondent signed himself E.J.H. and claimed to have a brother aboard HMS Terror. He had already given up hope for that brother, but wanted stronger grounds for the dreadful particulars Rae had reported. Nine years after the ships were last seen by Europeans, their scattered possessions had become evidence in an argument about what could be believed.

The knowledge needed to eat

Franklin had sailed in 1845 with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to find a navigable Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic. The two ships carried 129 officers and men into waters north of the North American mainland. Searchers later found graves at Beechey Island, their first wintering place, but no account of the expedition's end.

Rae was a Hudson's Bay Company surveyor and an experienced Arctic traveller. In April 1854, working near Pelly Bay, he learned of white men said to have died far to the west. His interpreter was William Ouligbuck, an Inuk whose father had also worked with British explorers. Over the following months, Rae questioned people and bought objects they had obtained from the missing expedition.

His report preserves a distinction often lost in retelling. None of the people he questioned had personally seen the travelling sailors or the places where their bodies were found. They were passing on information from others. Rae's English account was therefore already the result of recollection, transmission and interpretation.

The silver could be checked more directly. Rae listed initials, crests and a little round plate engraved with Franklin's name and honours. Other purchases included pieces of watches, an optical instrument, a compass box, a surgeon's knife and two leaves from a book.

Those marks connected the objects to particular people and to this expedition. They did not locate the owners' deaths. Rae obtained the articles from people who travelled and traded; the place of purchase was another stage in an object's journey.

The accompanying reports described thin men hauling a boat and sledges southwards, bodies found later, and evidence that the desperate survivors had resorted to cannibalism. Rae stated his conclusion and the indirect nature of his information together. He had not visited the remains himself.

E.J.H. raised another objection: Inuit could live in the region, and Rae's party had found food, so why could Franklin's men not do the same? Rae's answer concerned the season and the work. In spring, snow concealed seal breathing holes. Dogs could find them by smell, but killing a seal still required patience and experience. After the thaw, seals lying on the ice were difficult to approach.

Rae supplied an unusually precise comparison. His men had tried to get close enough to shoot them. Ouligbuck could; the others could not. Rae's winter provisions had also depended on autumn deer migrations and hard work by a fit, practised party. Knowing that food existed in a country was a long way from being able to obtain it when and where it was needed.

Rae was not free of the prejudices of his time. His expedition report contains contemptuous judgements about Inuit, as well as recognition of the people who helped him. But in defending the information he had brought home, he made local skill visible to readers who had imagined subsistence as a simple matter of finding animals.

Writing round the margins

Further searching narrowed attention to King William Island and the nearby mainland. Lady Franklin financed the yacht Fox under Francis Leopold McClintock. In 1859 his second-in-command, William Hobson, found a record left in a cairn, a pile of stones used as a marker, near the island's north-western coast.

The sheet had begun as a printed Admiralty message form. Its instructions asked whoever found it to send it to London, giving the time and place of discovery. The request appeared in six languages. Handwriting filled the blanks and then, in a later entry, ran round the margins.

The first message, dated 28 May 1847 and signed by Graham Gore and Charles Des Voeux, recorded the ships wintering in the ice and Franklin in command. It reported all well. It also put the Beechey Island winter a year too late, an error McClintock noticed when he published the text.

The second entry was dated 25 April 1848. The ships had been trapped since 12 September 1846 and abandoned three days before the addition was written. Franklin had died on 11 June 1847. Nine officers and fifteen men had died in all. The remaining 105 were ashore under Francis Crozier, with departure for Back's Fish River planned for the following day. James Fitzjames and Crozier signed the addition.

The paper supplied dates and numbers that no recovered fork could give. It ended, however, with an intention to travel. It did not describe the subsequent march, explain why the men died or say whether anyone would return to the ships.

McClintock found another difficulty in making possessions tell a continuous story. Hobson had located a large boat on a sledge; McClintock examined it later. It contained human remains, clothing, tools, books, watches and silverware. The twenty-six pieces of silver included property associated with officers from both ships. There was no simple equation between a spoon's owner and the identity of a person beside it.

The sledge pointed north-east when examined. McClintock thought the party might have been returning towards the ships, with men left at the boat while others sought provisions. He placed that discussion under the heading Conjectures. His measurements and inventory were observations; the interrupted journey he assembled from them was a proposed explanation.

A map with its maker's name

Ten years later, another investigator reached the region with people who could sustain more detailed conversations. Charles Francis Hall, an American searching for further traces of the expedition, worked with the Inuit interpreters and travellers Taqulittuq and Ipiivik. His published narrative calls them Too-koo-li-too and Ebierbing, and sometimes Hannah and Joe.

In May 1869 they met Inukpujijuk, whose name appears in Hall's record as In-nook-poo-zhee-jook. A silver spoon bearing Franklin's crest was among the first objects shown. The conversations required adjustment even for the interpreters: the narrative records Taqulittuq and Ipiivik becoming accustomed to the local idiom.

Inukpujijuk drew the country. His map outlined King William Island and neighbouring shores, with numbers referring to named places. The first entry in the accompanying list identified a place where one of the ships had sunk. This was information expressed through remembered geography, rather than an object whose movements had to be guessed.

He also guided Hall on the ground. When the party travelled towards sites on the island, Hall described him leading them directly to their destination. In a separate conversation, with charts before them, Inukpujijuk indicated a wreck near the northern end of O'Reilly Island. The account of the ship's first boarding belonged to another Inuk; drawing and locating that information did not mean the mapmaker had personally witnessed every event he described.

The recovered things had acquired new uses along the way. Hall obtained a mahogany writing desk to which Inuit had fitted a bottom board. It had recently served as a tray for blubber. Elsewhere he recorded part of a file sharpened into a cutting tool. Timber and metal from the expedition had entered working households, where their usefulness did not depend on retaining their naval form.

Recording a place before lifting an object

The search continued through later generations. Louie Kamookak, a historian from Gjoa Haven, gathered elders' knowledge and regional place names and shared them with researchers. In 2014, a Government of Nunavut land team found cached ship material on an island. The find helped redirect the marine search that located Erebus near the region described in the nineteenth-century testimony. Terror was found in 2016 in Terror Bay.

Archaeology has also given firmer grounds for part of the information Rae had reported. Cut marks on human remains support the accounts of survival cannibalism. In 2024, DNA and genealogical work identified remains of Fitzjames, a signatory to the marginal message. His jawbone was among those bearing cut marks. That identification connected a named officer to a particular site, without supplying the missing sequence of the survivors' last days.

The wrecks made a different kind of recovery possible. Parks Canada's film of its 2019 Erebus work follows divers clearing sediment, documenting finds and bringing objects to the surface. The position and depth of each item are recorded before it is removed.

A closer look · 5:31 · English; automatic captions available

Recovering objects from Erebus

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