Captain Franklin – The Lost Expedition of Captain Sir John Franklin
https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/NPC:Captain_Franklin
https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/NPC:Leftenant_Barrow
https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/NPC:Leftenant_Crozier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/what-happened-to-erebus-terror-crew-true-story
Thank you to Ashley D. for this one.
Captain Franklin is the condescending leader of a doomed expedition from Marleybone sent to discover Polaris. His expedition became stranded when instead of skimming over the top of the ice, the ship instead embedded itself in the ice.
He and his crew, Leftenant Barrow and Leftenant Crozier, need food and supplies. He asks your savage, err… wizard for some help. In exchange he will name a part of Polaris after you.
Second Secretary to the Admiralty
In 1804 Sir John Barrow became Second Secretary of the Admiralty, a post he held until 1845. Barrow began pushing for the Royal Navy to find a Northwest Passage over the top of Canada and to navigate toward the North Pole, organizing a major series of expeditions. Over those four decades explorers including John Ross; David Buchan; William Edward Parry; Frederick William Beechey; James Clark Ross (nephew of John Ross); George Back; Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson led productive expeditions to the Canadian Arctic. Among those explorers was John Franklin, who first travelled to the region in 1818 as second-in-command of an expedition towards the North Pole on the ships Dorothea and Trent.
Franklin’s lost expedition was a failed British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin that departed England in 1845 aboard two ships, HMS Erebus (commanded by Commander James Fitzjames) and HMS Terror (commanded by Captain Francis Crozier, executive officer for the expedition), and was assigned to traverse the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic and to record magnetic data to help determine whether a better understanding could aid navigation. The expedition met with disaster after both ships and their crews, a total of 129 officers and men, became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut. After being icebound for more than a year Erebus and Terror were abandoned in April 1848, by which point two dozen men, including Franklin, had died. The survivors, now led by Franklin’s second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus’s captain, James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland and disappeared, presumably having perished.
Pressed by Franklin’s wife, Jane, and others, the Admiralty launched a search for the missing expedition in 1848. In the many subsequent searches in the decades afterwards, several artefacts from the expedition were discovered, including the remains of two men, which were returned to Britain. A series of scientific studies in modern times suggested that the men of the expedition did not all die quickly. Hypothermia, starvation, lead poisoning or zinc deficiency and diseases including scurvy, along with general exposure to a hostile environment while lacking adequate clothing and nutrition, killed everyone on the expedition in the years after it was last sighted by Europeans in 1845. Cut marks on some of the bones recovered during these studies also supported allegations of cannibalism reported by Franklin searcher John Rae in 1854.
from the Illustrated London News
Despite the expedition’s notorious failure, it did succeed in exploring the vicinity of what was one of the many Northwest Passages to eventually be discovered. Robert McClure led one of the expeditions that investigated the fate of Franklin’s expedition, a voyage which was also beset by great challenges and later controversies. McClure’s expedition returned after finding an ice-bound route that connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. The Northwest Passage was not navigated by boat until 1906, when Roald Amundsen traversed the passage on the Gjøa.
In 2014, a search team led by Parks Canada located the wreck of Erebus in the eastern portion of Queen Maud Gulf. Two years later, the Arctic Research Foundation found the wreck of Terror south of King William Island, in the body of water named Terror Bay. Research and dive expeditions are an annual occurrence at the wreck sites, now protected as a combined National Historic Site.
The current list of all the (known) Polaris references can be found here.
Although I am well versed in Pop Culture references but I do not claim to have caught them all. Let me know your favorites in the comments and if I’ve missed one you caught, let me know so I can add it to the list.
Text for this article is excerpted from the linked wiki pages
Captain Franklin, Leftenant Barrow and Leftenant Crozier images are from Wizard101, and are copyright of KingsIsle Entertainment
Triptych assembled Alien Graphics.
All Captain Franklin expedition images are borrowed from Wikipedia and are in the public domain.
Image usage qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
Vulcan Stev's Database 