of the isthmus. Here, amid the sterile uniformity of snow and slate, were the head-boards of three graves, made after the old orthodox fashion of gravestones at home.
The tombs lay side by side in a line with the headboards facing Cape Riley. Two of the grave mounds were “neatly paved round” with limestone slabs. Their inscriptions, chiselled into the headboards, read:
Sacred
to the
memory of
William Braine, R.M.,
H.M.S. Erebus
Died April 3d, 1846
aged 32 years
‘Choose ye this day whom ye will serve’
Joshua, ch. xxiv., 15.
The second was:
Sacred to the memory of
John Hartnell, A.B. of H.M.S.
Erebus,
died January 4th, 1846
aged 25 years.
‘Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways.’
Haggai, i., 7.
The third grave, representing the earliest death, was not as carefully finished as the others, but Kane felt “its general appearance was more grave-like.” The headboard was inscribed:
Sacred
to
the memory of
John Torrington
who departed
this
life January 1st,
A.D. 1846,
on board of
H.M. ship Terror
aged 20 years
Osborn noted that some seashells from the bay had been collected and “prettily arranged… by some old messmates.” The orderly arrangement of what Kane called the “isthmus of the graves” reminded Osborn of a parish cemetery.
… it breathes of the quiet churchyard in some of England’s many nooks… and the ornaments that nature decks herself with, even in the desolation of the frozen zone, were carefully culled to mark the seaman’s last home.
The searchers hoped the discovery of the expedition’s winter campsite and the graves of its first three victims would somehow point to Franklin’s whereabouts. The dates inscribed on the headboards showed that the doomed expedition had passed the winter of 1845–46 nestled in a small bay on the east side of Beechey Island, and there was more.
The three Franklin expedition graves on Beechey Island. Drawn from a sketch by Dr. E.K. Kane
Searchers sweeping the windblown island during the shortening days of late summer found other signs, including the remains of tenting sites, an armourer’s forge, a large storehouse, a carpenter’s house and a few other, smaller structures. Deep ruts left by sledges were found on the gravel terraces of Devon Island, leaving Osborn to observe “how little Franklin’s people were impressed with the importance of rendering their travelling equipment light and portable.” A polar bear killed by one of the searchers revealed an earlier bullet wound. The bullet was retrieved from the beast’s flesh and identified as having been fired from a weapon like those supplied to Franklin. Kane found “inexpressibly touching” the discovery of a little garden scraped into the gravel, with anemones still growing. Wrote Kane: “A garden implies a purpose either to remain or to return: he who makes it is looking to the future.” This discovery on Beechey Island, especially moving to a nation of gardeners, inspired a verse by Charles Dickens:
O then
Pause on the footprints of heroic men,
Making a garden of the desert wide
Where PARRY conquer’d and FRANKLIN died.
Another large cairn was discovered, this one made of more than 600 discarded food tins filled with gravel, but nowhere was there a message telling where Franklin and his crews had sailed. Why these empty cans had been stacked 7 feet (2.1 metres) high in such a manner was unclear. It was usual for Arctic expeditions to leave messages under cairns describing their current status and plans—but here there was no note. Such was the scale of popular interest in each development during the Franklin searches that even this peculiar discovery—a cairn of tins built without apparent purpose—found its way into another literary work, Walden, where Henry David Thoreau asked, “Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him?”
Wrote Thoreau: “Explore your own higher latitudes with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign.” But a sign of what in this case? What did it mean? With each discovery the Franklin mystery only seemed to deepen. As well, the trail that began at Cape Riley on Devon Island seemed to end on Beechey Island, just 1¼ miles (2 km) away. Osborn expressed the mood of the searchers this way: “Everyone felt that there was something so inexplicable in the non-discovery of any record, some written evidence of the intentions of Franklin and Crozier on leaving this spot… ”
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