The Coppermine expedition of 1819–1822 was a British overland undertaking to survey and chart the area from Hudson Bay to the north coast of North America, eastwards from the mouth of the Coppermine River. The expedition was organised by the Royal Navy as part of its attempt to discover and map the Northwest Passage. The first of three Arctic expeditions that were led by John Franklin, it involved George Back and John Richardson, both of whom later became notable Arctic explorers in their own right.
The expedition was plagued by poor planning, bad luck and unreliable allies. The local trading posts of fur trading companies and First Nations offered less assistance than expected, and the dysfunctional supply line, coupled with unusually harsh weather and poor hunting due to an absence of game, meant the explorers were never far from starvation. Eventually, the party reached the Arctic coast, but only explored roughly 500 miles (800 km) before turning back due to the onset of winter and the exhaustion of their supplies.
The party desperately retreated across uncharted territory in a state of starvation, often with nothing more than lichen to eat; 11 of the 22 members died amid accusations of murder and cannibalism. The survivors were rescued by members of the Yellowknives Nation, who had previously given them up for dead.
In the aftermath, local fur traders criticised Franklin for his haphazard planning and failure to adapt. Back in Britain he was received as a hero and fêted for the courage he had shown in extreme adversity. The expedition captured the public imagination, and in reference to a desperate measure he took while starving, he became known as "the man who ate his boots".
Background
In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, the British Navy, under the influence of Sir John Barrow, turned its attention to the discovery of the Northwest Passage, a putative sea route around the north coast of North America which would allow European ships easy access to the markets of the Orient. Evidence for the existence of a passage came from the fact that whalers in the Bering Strait had killed whales which carried tusks of the type used in Greenland and vice versa, but the maze of islands north of the continent was almost completely unmapped; and it was not known whether a navigable, ice-free passage existed.
By 1819 the northern coast had been glimpsed only twice by Europeans. In 1771 Samuel Hearne had followed the Coppermine River to the sea at a point around 1,500 miles (2,400 km) east of the Bering Strait. He was followed in 1789 by Alexander Mackenzie, who traced what is now the Mackenzie River to open sea 500 miles (800 km) west of the mouth of the Coppermine.
In 1818, Barrow had sent his first expedition to seek the Northwest Passage. Led by John Ross, it ended ignominiously when Ross entered Lancaster Sound, the true entrance to the Northwest Passage, but judging it to be a bay turned around and returned to Britain. At the same time, David Buchan made an attempt to sail directly to the North Pole from Britain (Barrow was a believer in the Open Polar Sea hypothesis), but returned only with the news that the pack ice north of Spitsbergen was a barrier which could not be breached.
The following year, Barrow planned two further expeditions to the Arctic. A seaborne expedition under William Edward Parry would follow on from Ross' work, seeking an entrance to the Northwest Passage from Lancaster Sound. Simultaneously, a party would travel overland to the north coast by way of the Coppermine River and map as much of the coastline as possible, and perhaps even rendezvous with Parry's ships. John Franklin, a lieutenant who had commanded one of David Buchan's ships the previous year, was chosen to lead the overland party.
Preparations
Franklin's orders were somewhat general in nature. He was to travel overland to Great Slave Lake, and from there follow the Coppermine River (which arises from Lac de Gras near Great Slave Lake). On reaching the coast he was advised to head east towards Repulse Bay and William Edward Parry's (hopefully victorious) ships, but if it seemed better, he was given the option of going west to map the coastline between the Coppermine and the Mackenzie Rivers, or even heading north into wholly unknown seas.
More serious than the ambiguity of the instructions was that the expedition was organised with an extremely limited budget. John Franklin was to take only a minimum of naval personnel and would be reliant on outside help for much of the journey. Manual assistance was meant to be provided by Métis voyageurs supplied by the Hudson's Bay Company and their rivals the North West Company, while the local Yellowknives would act as guides and provide food should John Franklin's supplies run out.
Only four naval personnel accompanied John Franklin; the doctor, naturalist and second in command John Richardson; two midshipmen named Robert Hood and George Back, the latter of whom had sailed with David Buchan in 1818; and an ordinary seaman named John Hepburn. As documented in his journals, a second ordinary seaman, Samuel Wilkes, was initially assigned to the party, but fell ill on arriving in Canada and played no further part in the expedition, returning to England with dispatches. He later served as armourer on HMS Hecla in Captain Parry's 1821 expedition.
Expedition
Cumberland House
The Coppermine Expedition sailed from Gravesend on 23 May 1819 on a Hudson's Bay Company supply ship, after three months of planning, and immediately hit a note of farce. The ship had stopped briefly off the Norfolk coast, where George Back had business to attend to, but before he returned a favourable wind blew up and the ship sailed off, leaving Back to make his own way to their next stop in Orkney by stagecoach and ferry.
A more serious problem arose in Stromness when the expedition, now reunited with Back, attempted to hire local boatmen to act as manhaulers for the first part of the overland trek. The sudden success of the herring fisheries that year meant that the Orkneymen were far less keen to sign up than had been anticipated. Only four men were recruited, and even they agreed to go only as far as Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca.
On 30 August 1819, Franklin's men reached York Factory, the main port on the southwest coast of Hudson Bay, to begin the 1,700 miles (2,700 km) trek to Great Slave Lake. They immediately encountered the first of the supply problems which were to plague the expedition. Much of the assistance offered by the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company failed to materialise; the companies had spent the preceding years in a state of virtual war and cooperation between them was virtually nonexistent – they had few resources to spare.
Franklin was provided with a boat too small to carry all his supplies and proceeded—he was assured the rest would be sent on—along normal trading routes to Cumberland House; little more than a log cabin which was home to 30 Hudson's Bay men. He and his men spent the winter here. The winter of 1819 was a harsh one and ominously, the local First Nations who came to the post for supplies reported that game had become so scarce that some families were resorting to cannibalism to survive.
Fort Chipewyan
The following January, Franklin, Back and Hepburn formed an advance party to head through the pine forests to Fort Chipewyan, to hire voyageurs and arrange supplies for the next leg of the expedition. Led by Canadian guides, the Britons, who had no experience of the harsh winters of the region, found the journey extremely arduous. The constant and extreme cold froze their tea almost immediately after it had been poured, as well as the mercury in their thermometers.
Without tents, they were grateful for snowfall, as it provided an extra layer of insulation over their blankets. Franklin later wrote that the journey brought "a great inter-mixture of agreeable and disagreeable circumstances. Could the amount of each be balanced, I suspect the latter would much preponderate."
The advance party arrived at Fort Chipewyan in late March, having covered 857 miles (1,379 km) in six weeks. Once there, Franklin found equipping his expedition far more difficult than had been anticipated. The harsh winter meant that food was barely available, and he had to make do with a vague promise that hunters would feed them en route, and that the chief of the Coppermine First Nations would offer assistance.
The best voyageurs were preoccupied with the conflict between the two fur trading companies, or unwilling to risk a journey into unknown terrain, far outside their normal range and with uncertain supplies. Eventually, Franklin was able to recruit a team of 16 voyageurs, but most of the men fell well below the standard he desired.
Fort Enterprise
Reunited with Hood and Richardson, the party left for Great Slave Lake in July, reaching the trading post at Fort Providence on its northern shore ten days later. Here they met Akaitcho, the leader of the local Yellowknives (or Copper Dene) First Nation who had been recruited by the North West Company as guides and hunters for Franklin's men. Akaitcho, described as a man "of great penetration and shrewdness" understood the concept of the Northwest Passage, and patiently listened as Franklin explained that its use would bring wealth to his people. Apparently realising that Franklin was exaggerating the benefits, he asked a question which Franklin was unable to answer: why, if the Northwest Passage was so crucial to trade, had it not been discovered already?
His point effectively made, Akaitcho discussed his terms with Franklin. In return for the cancellation of his tribe's debts to the North West Company, and a supply of weapons, ammunition and tobacco, his men would hunt and guide Franklin on the northward journey down the Coppermine River, and leave depots of food for their return. However, they would not enter the Inuit lands at the far north of the river, since the Yellowknives and the Inuit viewed each other with mutual hostility and suspicion. Akaitcho warned Franklin that in such a hard year, he could not guarantee food would always be available. Akaitcho and his band have been described (By Franklin, Richardson, Back, Hood and others) as hired guides and hunters.
Franklin and his men spent the remainder of the summer of 1820 trekking north to a point on the bank of the Snare River which Akaitcho had chosen as their winter quarters. Food quickly ran short and the voyageurs began to lose faith in their leader; Franklin's threats of severe punishment prevented a mutiny in the short term, but eroded the remaining goodwill felt by the men. The encampment, which Franklin named Fort Enterprise, was reached without further incident, and wooden huts were constructed as winter quarters.
Coppermine River
The expedition's second winter was another difficult one. Supplies arrived only intermittently; the rival companies each preferring to let the other provide them. Ammunition ran short, and the First Nations hunters were less effective than had been hoped. Finally, with the party at risk of starvation, Back was sent back to Fort Providence to browbeat the companies into action. After a 1,200 miles (1,900 km) journey on snowshoes, often with no shelter beyond blankets and a deerskin in temperatures as low as −55 °C (−67 °F), Back returned having secured enough supplies to meet the expedition's immediate needs.
There was also continuing unrest in the camp. The voyageurs, led by the two interpreters Pierre St. Germain and Jean Baptiste Adam, rebelled. Franklin's threats were ineffective; St. Germain and Adam insisting that because continuing into the wilderness would mean certain death, the threat of execution for mutiny was laughable. Negotiation by Willard Wentzel, the North West Company's representative, eventually restored an uneasy truce. The discord was not confined to the voyageurs; Back and Hood had fallen out over their rivalry for the affections of a Yellowknives girl nicknamed Greenstockings, and would have fought a duel with pistols over her had John Hepburn not removed the gunpowder from their weapons. The situation was defused when Back was dispatched south. Hood subsequently fathered a child with Greenstockings.
The winter of 1820–21 passed, and Franklin set out again on 4 June 1821. His plans for the coming summer were vague; he had decided to explore east from the mouth of the Coppermine in the hope of either meeting William Edward Parry or reaching Repulse Bay, where he might obtain adequate supplies from local Inuit to allow him to return directly to York Factory by way of Hudson Bay. However, if Parry failed to appear, or he was unable to reach Repulse Bay he would either retrace his outward route or, if it seemed better, return directly to Fort Enterprise across the uncharted Barren Lands to the east of the Coppermine River.