John Franklin (April 15, 1786 - June 11, 1847) was an English sea captain and Arctic explorer, whose fate -- and that of his last expedition -- was for many years a mystery.
Franklin was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. He was one of twelve children of a family which had prospered in trade, and one of his sisters became the mother of Emily Tennyson (wife of the poet). He decided on a naval career at the age of fourteen, and was present at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. During the latter, he served on board the ill-fated HMS Bellerophon. One of Franklin's uncles was Captain Matthew Flinders, with whom he also travelled to Australia. In 1814, he was at the Battle of New Orleans. He first travelled to the Arctic in 1818, under the leadership of John Ross, and became fascinated by it. On an expedition into the Northwest Territories of Canada, he and his party were forced to eat lichen to survive and even attempted to eat their own leather boots. This gained him the nickname of "the man who ate his boots". In 1823, after returning to England, he married a poet, Eleanor Porden. She died in 1825, shortly after persuading her husband not to let her ill-health prevent him from setting off on an expedition to Alaska.
In 1828, he was knighted by King George IV of the United Kingdom, and in the same year married Jane Griffin, a seasoned traveller who proved indomitable in the course of their life together. He was appointed Governor of Tasmania in 1836, but was removed from office in 1843, partly because of his attempts to reform the penal colony there. Franklin was still obsessed with finding the Northwest Passage. Having succeeded in raising the necessary finance, he set off with a party of 128 men in May, 1845, in two ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. They never returned. In 1854, another explorer, John Rae, discovered evidence of their fate, and Lady Franklin paid others to set out in search of the expedition. Eventually, in 1858, some of the bodies of the party were found, along with a document by Franklin's second-in-command, giving the date of his death.
There are several theories about what happened to Franklin's men. It has been suggested that they died of lead poisoning from the canned food they were carrying with them. There is also some evidence that they resorted to cannibalism.