In May 1845 the Royal Navy sent Sir John Franklin into the Canadian Arctic with two bomb vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to complete the last unmapped link of the Northwest Passage. Every one of the 129 men aboard died. The ships were beset in the ice off King William Island in September 1846, were never freed, and were abandoned in April 1848. The survivors dragged boats and sledges south across the sea ice and the island toward the Back River and died strung out along the way, of cold, starvation, scurvy and the slow toxic accumulation of a flawed supply system. It remains the deadliest disaster in the history of polar exploration.
The expedition was, on paper, the best-equipped Arctic venture Britain had ever launched: three years of tinned provisions, steam engines, internal heating, libraries. It vanished into a region the Admiralty believed it understood and did not. No survivor was ever found, and no continuous written account survives beyond a single two-line note left under a cairn at Victory Point. That note, signed by Captains Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, records that Franklin had died on 11 June 1847 and that 105 men deserted the ships on 22 April 1848 — the last dated word from anyone aboard.
What is known of the men’s final months comes not from the Navy but from the Inuit, who saw the survivors, who later found their bodies and their gear, and who told searchers plainly what had happened: men starving, men dying as they walked, and bodies that bore the marks of cannibalism among the last to live. The Hudson’s Bay surveyor John Rae carried that testimony back to Britain in 1854 and was vilified for it, most famously by Charles Dickens, who could not accept that British sailors might eat their dead and dismissed the Inuit as unreliable savages. The forensic record has since proved the Inuit account correct in nearly every particular. The same Inuit knowledge, carried in oral history for more than a century and a half, ultimately led searchers to the wrecks of Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016.
In 1881 the United States Army Signal Corps sent twenty-five men under First Lieutenant Adolphus Greely to Lady Franklin Bay, on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, to run a scientific station for the First International Polar Year. The expedition’s research went well; its logistics did not. The relief ships that were meant to resupply the party failed two summers running, leaving the men to retreat south and then to slowly starve. Of the twenty-five, only six were rescued alive in June 1884. Nineteen died. The toll included one man shot on Greely’s order for repeated food theft, and several of the dead were later found with flesh cut from their bodies — cannibalism of the dead by the starving, which the forensic record supports and which the survivors never publicly admitted.
The scientific phase, from 1881 to 1883 at Fort Conger, was a success. The party gathered two years of meteorological, magnetic and astronomical data, and a sledging team reached a new Farthest North of 83°24′N. The disaster lay entirely in the supply chain. Under the plan, a ship would bring fresh provisions in 1882 and, if needed, again in 1883; if no ship came, the party was to retreat south by boat to meet relief near Smith Sound. Both ships failed — the first turned back by ice, the second crushed by it — and the contingency that should have saved the men instead delivered them to a barren shore with almost nothing to eat.
What followed was a winter of deliberate, documented dying. From a hut of stone and overturned boat at Cape Sabine the men starved through the dark, rationing scraps, boiling sealskin and lichen, and dying one after another from late 1883 into the summer of 1884. When the relief squadron finally reached them on 22 June 1884, it found seven men barely alive in a collapsed tent; one of those died days later. The survivors came home to honour and then to scandal, as the manner of the deaths — the execution, and the cannibalism — became public.
In 1913 an American scientific expedition sailed north to reach and explore “Crocker Land,” a vast Arctic landmass that the explorer Robert Peary had reported sighting in 1906 from the far north of the Canadian archipelago. The land did not exist. The party, led by Donald Baxter MacMillan and sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, the American Geographical Society and the University of Illinois, crossed hundreds of miles of polar sea ice in the spring of 1914 toward a horizon that proved to be a mirage — a Fata Morgana thrown up by the ice — and then could not get home. A succession of relief ships failed or were frozen in, and the men were stranded in northwest Greenland for four years, finally extracted in 1917. One human life was taken on the ice, not by the cold but by a member of the party: the ensign Fitzhugh Green shot dead the Inuit guide Piugaattoq, an experienced hunter who had correctly judged the land to be an illusion.
The expedition’s central error was epistemic. It committed years, money and lives to verifying a sighting that the man who made it appears to have known was false — Peary recorded no land in his diary at the time he later claimed to have seen Crocker Land — and it pressed deep onto breaking spring sea ice in pursuit of an image that the Inuit on the party identified immediately as poojok, mist. The science the expedition gathered along the way, in geology, ethnography and natural history, was substantial and is preserved in major museum collections. But its defining facts are a phantom continent, a four-year stranding, and a killing on the ice for which no one was ever charged.
From a base at Etah, Greenland, the sledging march struck out across the frozen ocean in spring 1914; by 27 April MacMillan had to concede that the land they had followed for days was not there. On the return, having sent Piugaattoq and Green ahead together, Green shot the Inuk hunter and reported him dead. The men then waited out year after year as ships sent to bring them home were turned back or trapped, until Robert Bartlett’s Neptune finally carried the last of them out in 1917.