Fitzjames' cabin

 This is my approximation of the cabin on HMS Erebus of Commander James Fitzjames. It's mostly based on the picture below which was published in the May 24, 1845 issue of the Illustrated London News.

I've flipped the ILN picture from the way it was printed to make it accord with the ship's plans. The most noticeable feature on my view compared with the ILN's is the wash stand which the 1839 plans show to the left of the doorway as you go in. The space is no bigger than a decent size closet - about half the size of the en-suite bathroom of the hotel room I stayed in last week.

Are you friendly? - we are!

These are my thoughts on Russell Potter's recent posts on the meanings of the expressions "Mannik toomee" and "Teyma".

My view is that a close look at these words does support the suggestion that Kok-lee-arng-nun's "Too-loo-ah" was actually Franklin and not John Ross.

The expressions in question are found in the following sources:

1819 Franklin - "Teyma"
1825 Franklin - "Teyma"
1829 Ross - "Tima tima", "Aya tima"
1833 Back - "Timā"
1833 King - "Tĭmā"

1859 McClintock - "Kammik toome"

1866 Hall via Kok-lee-arng-nun - "Man-nig-too-me", "Ma-my-too-mig-tey-ma" (= "Mannik toomee" + "Teyma")

1879 Schwatka - "Munnik toomee"
1879 Gilder - "Many-tu-me"
1995 Dorothy Eber via Lena Kingmiatook - "Maniktumiq"


The different versions of "Mannik toomee" reported by McClintock, Hall, Schwatka, and Gilder are consistently a declaration of friendship. Eber's reported usage by the shamen is little different if at all - an exhortation to the group to behave non-aggressively to the strangers.

Such an amicable meaning would be out of place in Back's confrontation with the shamen during his ascent of the river and no shamen is mentioned in connection with the earlier, friendly, encounter on the descent, so certainly the source for this suggestion needs to be re-examined.

It seems entirely plausible that a sledge party from Franklin's ships could encounter a band of Inuit and thus pick up the phrase "Mannik toomee" in exactly the same way that later sledgers would do.

It appears that Teyma was not a proper Inuktitut word at all but a pidgin word used to initiate commerce.

John Ross's definition "the word of salutation between meeting tribes" seems closest to that reported by modern linguists (hence the title of this post). Franklin is also not far off target when, in the account of his first overland expedition, he describes the expression Teyma as "used by the Esquimaux when they accost strangers in a friendly manner".

Ross reports a greeting ritual where the white men call "Tima tima" which is then echoed by the Inuit, then the white men throw down their arms with a cry of "Aya, Tima". To which the Inuit reply with "Aya" and throw down their weapons.

In contrast, Too-loo-ah's reported usage seems more consistent with Back and King's understanding of the word as meaning "peace". Tacking the word "peace" on to a greeting would not seem unreasonable for such a humane soul as Franklin but as Ross did not misinterpret the word that way and only reported it as part of a verbal formula then that would count against Ross as Kok-lee-arng-nun's "Too-loo-ah".

So I'd say that this analysis adds a little more weight to the theory that Hall's informant Kok-lee-arng-nun did indeed visit HMS Erebus while Franklin was alive.

Fitzjames' Demonic Companion

This enlargement from the engraving published in the Illustrated London News seems to show a grotesque face peering out from James Fitzjames' bedside table. The item is a type of candle lantern sometimes described as a 'chamberstick with storm glass'. I've looked at thousands of pictures of candlesticks and lanterns on the web but so far I have been unable to find a picture of anything similar. I've found a few examples with a pierced foliage pattern on the gallery supporting the glass but nothing resembling a face. Perhaps it was a souvenir of Fitzjames' travels, or maybe even it was never really there and is just a private joke by the engraver.

Pemmican

I have long been familiar with the name of Pemmican as the legendary food of Arctic travellers, but I was always curious as to what it was and how it tasted.

So a while back, in the spirit of learning by replication, I decided to make some using the recipe described in Sir John Richardson's 1851 boat-voyage journal.

Not having a malt kiln, I used a domestic fan oven and ground the dessicated meat in a hand cranked coffee grinder. Beef dripping was the fat added.

The cooking smells and the morsels which I consumed, in the interests of science, during the preparation were delicious but, of the finished product, I find myself completely in agreement with Charles Francis Hall's comment in his 'Life with the Esquimaux' when he says:

"This article is eaten not because it tastes good, for it does not, but to live.
It is almost like eating tallow candles."

It certainly more palatable when made into Hoosh, the staple of Antarctic explorers.

Time we put the tinned food back in the cupboard: Busting the Franklin Expedition myth of 'lead poisoning from tinned food'.

The idea that Franklin's men were poisoned by lead from tinned food has reached almost the status of dogma. For many members of the public it seems to be almost the only 'fact' they know about the expedition.

Owen Beattie and John Geiger's bestselling book 'Frozen in Time' (2004 edition) includes the statement "There is no question of the source of the lead found in the bodies of Franklin's men: it came from the tinned foods". This claim is supported by a paper by Walt Kowal and others published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in March 1991, but, contrary to that claim, the source of the lead was questioned from the very first.

ISOTOPES:

Kowal and his co-authors found that the ratios of the several isotopes of lead in solder from cans found on Beechey Island matched the ratios measured in human remains from Beechey and King William Islands. They concluded from this that the lead in both cases came from the same source. That seems reasonable - indeed it's likely that all the lead on the ships came from the same source.

No measurements were made on contemporary British samples of lead, instead the authors referred to a database of isotope ratios of 98 samples of lead ore from the British Isles published by Stephen Moorbath in 1962.

Having found no credible match, they speculated that:

"...since the isotopic ratio for the Franklin materials is so different from most lead sources in the British Isles, it is quite possible that the lead used in the solder manufacture came from some other nation".

Their argument seems to be, that because all of the other sources of lead which the members of the expedition would have been exposed would have come from British mines, then the only possible explanation for the presence of the unusual exotic lead in the human remains was that it had come from the solder of the tin cans.

Unfortunately mass-spectrometry was still in its infancy in the early sixties, and the isotope measurements published in Moorbath's paper do not bear direct comparison with those made thirty years later. In 1996 Brenda Rohl published isotope ratios of 383 samples of lead ore from the British Isles. Her introduction states:

"The data in pioneering papers such as Moorbath (1962) and Brown (1966) are now too inaccurate to be compared with modern lead isotope data".

MINING:

It is implausable that isotope data could be used to trace the origin of any industrial era lead back to a single mine. Even connecting a sample with a single mining region presents difficulties.

Veins of ore with distinct isotope ratios can occur in close proximity. Equally, veins with indistinuishable isotope signatures can occur many miles apart. A small number of smelters would serve numerous mines within a region, producing metallic lead with an isotope signature averaged from the constituent ores.

Lead is probably the most easily recycled material known to man. At the lead mills ingots of newly smelted lead would be melted together with old lead scrap to manufacture whichever products the market required, such as sheet or pipe or solder.

The isotope signature of a typical sample of manufactured lead would therefore represent an amalgam of both contemporary and previously active mining regions. The average composition of the mixture would change only gradually as established mining regions declined and new ore provinces were exploited.

In 1839, Andrew Ure published statistics showing the relative productivity of the different Lead mining regions at that time. The North Pennines (Durham, Cumberland, and Yorkshire) being the dominant region.

Click on image for source document

The following chart compares the Franklin project data with geological data from Rohl, chosen with reference to the above table, and data from 36 samples from the Northern Pennines, from a 2001 paper by Brett Scaife and others.

Click to enlarge.

Data points from the two Welsh counties are represented by the larger circles to make up for their small number. Derbyshire had been of greater significance in the preceding century hence may deserve greater prominence than Ure's figures suggest due to recycling of old lead. There has been no attempt to distinguish the relative productivity of individual mines within a region, nor to represent measurement confidence intervals.

The main feature to note in the above chart is that all the data points for the Franklin samples are within the locus of the data points for the Northern Pennines.

CONCLUSION:

It is plausible that the isotope signature shared by both the solder and the human remains is simply that of common English lead of the period and that the high levels of lead detected in the human remains could have resulted from exposure to any of a myriad of contemporary sources and certainly not uniquely to the solder of the tin cans.

That members of the expedition suffered from lead exposure is not disputed, but there is no evidence to suggest that "it was the reliance of Franklin's expedition on tinned food that was the root cause".

The supplier of the tinned food, the much vilified Stefan Goldner, is exonerated of any blame in connection with the demise of the Franklin Expedition.

The eminent Food Scientist and Science historian Keith Farrer, OBE (who even has an award named after him) was among the first to question the 'lead poisoning from tin cans' hypothesis.

In a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 1993, Farrer pointed out, among other things, that only acidic foods such as tomatoes can defeat the cathodic protection conferred on lead by the more reactive tin and iron and that the canned provisions supplied to the expedition included no acidic component. It appears that all published reports of canned food being been found with a high lead content have involved acidic foodstuffs.

Farrer's conclusion regarding the canned food was that "their contribution to the body loads of lead or to any incipient ill health in Franklin's crewmen was trivial".

However no scholarly article in a scientific journal can compete for the public consciousness with a bestseller like 'Frozen in Time'.

So I hope this small effort does something to redress the balance.

01-Aug-2011

Franklin's ships took refrigerators to the Arctic!

It may raise a few eyebrows when I confidently state that, for their fateful voyage to the frozen regions, HM ships Erebus and Terror were almost certainly equipped with refrigerators.

It is also a break with long held consensus, and a volte-face from my previous position, to suggest that the railway locomotive boilers fitted to these ships were modified to boil seawater instead of freshwater.

I'll start by explaining that in the context of early Victorian engineering the word refrigerator was used to refer to what is now called a heat-exchanger. The illustration below, from 1828, shows an example of the 'shell and tube' variety. The hot liquid to be cooled was passed through the array of small tubes while the cooling water flowed around them in the casing. A typical usage was in brewing - to cool the wort down to fermentation temperature after boiling.

Early nineteenth century heat exchanger

WATER:

I began to suspect that the boilers used sea water while thinking about the water consumption of the engines.

Captain Frederick William Beechey made the first proposal to fit auxiliary steam engines to Erebus and Terror with the proviso that they should only be used when there was a flat calm and the ice floes were no longer pressed together by the wind.

Beechey wrote "The openings in the ice are generally of short duration, perhaps for eight or twelve hours only."

Samuel Brees' statistics for the Rennies' engines include the information that the tender's 3.3 tons of water was sufficient for 1.87 hours operation. This equates to 21.2 tons in 12 hours.

The Terror's tanks held 6000 gallons or 26.8 tons so operating the engine for 12 hours would use 80% of the ships water, supposing that the tanks were brim full to begin with.

Alternatively the full capacity of Terror's tanks could sustain the engine for a little over 15 hours.

Fresh water is not difficult to find in an Arctic summer as melting snow forms ponds on ice flows but there would be no guarantee when the weather would allow it to be collected.

If fresh water from the ships' tanks were relied on for the boilers there would be a strong possibility that there would not be enough water on board to fully exploit the rare opportunity of an opening in the ice without endangering the crews lives.

Merely getting so much water out of the tanks in such a short time would be difficult. The ships had numerous separate tanks, most of which held around two tons, with stores piled on top of them. Merely getting at the apertures involved laboriously shifting stores around so that a hose from a force pump could be inserted.

Another useful nugget of information is found in the "Particulars of Steamships", in the National Archives.

The entry for Terror reads:

"Machinery & Boilers complete in every respect
On the 1st trial speed of the Terror was 3.6 knots per hour by Massey's log
with the disadvantage of river water priming the boilers it is expected the speed will be 3 1/2 knots per hour."

National Archives, crown copyright waived for non-commercial use.

The entry for Erebus reads:

"Machinery & boilers Reported to be complete,
on the 1st trial. speed of the "Terror" was 3.6 knots per hour by Massey's log
with the disadvantage of river water priming the boilers, the speed is expected to be 3 1/2 knots per hour"

National Archives, crown copyright waived for non-commercial use.

The Terror's speed trial is mentioned in the entries for both ships, which is perhaps another pointer that the engines were identical in each ship. Erebus, being a foot wider in the beam, would be expected to be slower.

The suggestion of using river water is a clear hint that the ships were equipped to use the water they floated in to feed their boilers. No officer in their right mind would have contemplated contaminating their ship's drinking water tanks with the filth which flowed in "the common sewer of London" - the Thames.


SALT:

I suspect that the widespread belief that the boilers could have only used fresh water is based on the assumption that they would have suffered from excessive corrosion if they had used seawater.

Using seawater certainly did cause greater corrosion. A typical lifespan of a ship's boiler using seawater was only around five years while a similar boiler on land using fresh water could easily last for twenty years. This would not be an issue during the very limited time in which the expedition's engines were expected to operate.

Around the time of the planning of the Franklin Expedition there was lively debate as to whether iron or brass was the best material for the tubes of ships' boilers.

Brass tubes conducted heat better and were resistant to scaling while iron tubes were more resistant to overheating and avoided galvanic corrosion.

A specification for paddle steamers issued by the Admiralty in January 1844, and another for screw steamers issued in September 1845, both included instructions for the tenders to include alternate costings for tubular boilers with iron tubes and with brass tubes.

More immediately dangerous than corrosion was the problem of increasing salt concentration.

A build-up of salt could cause a boiler to 'prime' or boil over, sending a mixture of water and steam to the cylinders. Worse, a boiler filled with excessively saline water could develop an insulating crust of insoluble calcium salts (essentially plaster of Paris) on the boiler tubes, diminishing the flow of heat to the boiler water and causing the tubes to fail through overheating.

In 1824 Henry Maudslay and Joshua Field had patented a method of changing water in boilers to prevent the deposition of salt and other substances.
In addition to the normal feedwater pumps common to every steam engine, the engine was equipped with what became known as 'brine pumps' which expelled a small quantity of hot supersaline water from the boiler in proportion to the quantity of seawater pumped in, thus allowing the salt concentration to remain constant. To avoid wasting heat, the hot water expelled was passed through a heat-exchanger or 'refrigerator' to transfer its heat energy to the incoming sea water.

The royal yacht Victoria and Albert (launched April 1843) had engines by Maudslay's complete with their system of brine pumps and refrigerators, and that system was also stipulated in both of the Admiralty's specifications mentioned.


CONCLUSION:

Franklin's ships were fitted with the best, most up-to-date technology of the day, including brine pumps and refrigerators (heat-exchangers). They used sea-water in their boilers.

It seems that studies of the Franklin Expedition have suffered from almost as many false trails as the searches for the Expedition itself.

Hopefully this will be the year that Parks Canada find some hard evidence to measure these speculations against.

George Back, saviour of Franklin's first expedition, unwitting poisoner of Franklin's last expedition

As a member of the first Arctic expedition commanded by Captain Franklin, the overland "Journey to the shores of the Polar Sea", Midshipman George Back made two courageous life-saving journeys, which prevented that expedition from becoming a complete tragedy. It is therefore ironic that it seems that Back may have later played an unwitting hand in adding lead poisoning to the misfortunes of the final, fatal, Franklin Expedition.

In my previous post I suggested that Sir Edward Belcher may have been responsible for installing the sub-standard snow-melters in the Erebus and Terror. I now find I have to eat my words as it appears the arrangement was finalised after the then Commander Belcher hauled down his pennant on the Terror on March 24 1836.

Belcher had modified Erebus and Terror in preparation for a mission to relieve a whaling fleet beset in sea ice off Greenland. In the event James Clark Ross conducted that task in the Cove, a hired whaler, so the Admiralty decided to make use of the Terror on a mission to trace the Northern boundary of the North American continent.

George Back was high in the Admiralty's esteem because of his recent success in his overland expedition to the mouth of the Great Fish River in 1833-35. He was promoted to Captain within a month of his return and was appointed to command the Terror on May 13th 1836.

Some rummaging in the National Archives last weekend produced a couple of letters which throw new light on the story of the ships' galley stoves and their attached snow-melters. The letters are both from Captain Back to Charles Wood, First Secretary to the Admiralty.

National Archives, Crown copyright waived for non-commercial use.

May 16th 1836

Sir,
I have the honor to inform you that the fire-hearth or galley apparatus of the Terror is fitted for a crew of 260 men, and in order to save fuel, I would suggest that a fire-hearth or grate of Williams, similar to that now in the Blazer be placed in its stead.

A note scribbled on a corner records the decision:

National Archives, Crown copyright waived for non-commercial use.

May 16. Store-keeper Genl to furnish one of Frazer's firehearths fit for a crew of 60 men

A second letter highlights a problem with the installation:

National Archives, Crown copyright waived for non-commercial use.

May 20th 1836

Sir,
The first Lieutenant of the Terror having represented to me that there is no scuttle over the condenser for the purpose of throwing in snow to melt, I have to request that you will move the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to give the necessary directions.

So what does this mean?

Back's suggestion to save fuel by replacing the over-sized galley stove was a good one. However, working under time pressure to get the Terror ready for the Arctic, the dockyard workers made mistakes. Lieutenant Smythe noticed the lack of a scuttle but other mistakes were overlooked and seem to have had unfortunate consequences.

The workmen who installed the ice tank appear to have thought of it only as a condenser for the steam of the cooks coppers and they were unaware of its additional intended duty of melting snow for water.

If, as seems likely, the pipe (shown on the Terror's plans) connecting the coppers and the ice tank was made of lead, it would have been made in Chatham's Lead and Paint Mills which since 1818 had produced all the Navy's lead products.

Clem Rutter, Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

Brass or Copper would also be a possibility although in the absence of seamless tubing, which would not be patented until June 1838, crafting such a curved pipe in the time available would be a fine test of the coppersmith's art. The end result would necessarily include many soldered joints.

It would therefore seem to be a reasonable explanation for the observed evidence of lead poisoning on the Franklin expedition that the lead came from the steam pipe fitted between 16th and 20th of May 1836 on the Terror, and from its duplicate on the Erebus. The lead being transferred to the ships' potable water by cycles of cooking and snow melting in the ships' coppers. There are of course many possible explanations (tinned food not being among them), but this has the advantage of having as it's cause something we can point to on the ships' plans instead of being dependant on suppositions unsupported by evidence.

So it seems likely that George Back played an unwitting role in the addition of lead poisoning to the list of hardships endured by Franklin's men. It is a final twist of irony that, after the ships were abandoned, the retreating party sought safety by heading for the river which was the source of Back's fame and which bore his name.