Today, we go looking for a lost explorer. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Oh, how England loved her
explorers! Small wonder they undertook heroics that
shock us in our comfortable lives today. When the
American, Stanley, went looking for Livingstone in
1872, both countries followed the search the way we
follow basketball. Those heroics expressed the
ideals of empire, along with all that was bad about
imperialism. Livingstone got into trouble with the
missionary society for caring more about
exploration than church work.
In another episode, we talk about the catalyst for
much of that -- the search for Sir John Franklin.
Franklin set out with two ships to look for a
Northwest Passage in 1845. After one year, with no
word, people didn't worry. After two years, they
wondered why he hadn't been able to get a message
back with the help of the Eskimos. After three
years people knew something was wrong. After four
years, his wife joined with the government to offer
a prize of £20,000 for anyone who found him.
So search parties went out. During 1850, at least
ten English and American expeditions were searching
for Franklin. They suffered, they died, they
established our knowledge of the Arctic. But they
didn't find Franklin. They did locate a route to
the Pacific where only bits and pieces of the ice
broke up during the summer. No ship got through the
passage in one season until 1944.
In 1857, Franklin's wife outfitted another search.
That one found Inuit natives who told of a ship
that'd broken up in the ice -- whose crew had tried
to walk out. Their search went on for three years
and it turned up a few scattered relics of
Franklin's people.
By the late 1860s, an American explorer learned
that five of Franklin's starving men had actually
survived, found their way to Alaska, and been
rescued by natives there. The last of them died in
1864 without ever finding a way home.
Finally, in 1878, an American, Frederick Schwatka,
and two companions decided not to mess around with
ships. They got off a whaler on the north shore of
Hudson's Bay and hired 13 Inuit guides. They set
off to the north in good hands.
Gradually they learned Franklin's terrible story.
Scattered groups, starving, eating their dead. A
cairn here, a boat with skeletons there. A small
book tells Schwatka's story, and the Inuit Indians
form a kind of Greek chorus for all that heroic
folly. Schwatka writes,
The Eskimos, as we know, are woefully deficient
in almost everything that civilization has taught
us to value and appreciate; but the deficiency has
not affected their cheerful and genial
disposition.
Those were the last days of the old empires.
Countless heroes, all wearing cultural blinders,
finally found out what really lay north of Canada.
Finally the rest of us had learned the lay of that
forbidding land -- which had been home to the
Inuits, all along.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
The Search for Franklin: A Narrative of the
American Expedition under Lieutenant Schwatka.
London: T. Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1888.
(No authorship indicated, although Schwatka wrote
parts of it.)
See also Episode 1240,
your library's catalog, and Encyclopaedia
Britannica entries -- especially those from
the older editions. A great deal was written about
these explorations during the 19th century.
For more information on Franklin, see the following
website: http://www.ric.edu/rpotter/SJFranklin.html.
Click on the image for an
enlargement.
Image courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
From The Search for Franklin, 1888
Click on the image for an
enlargement.
Image courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
Lt. Schwatka's trip (from The Search for
Franklin, 1888)
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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