Sir John Franklin, a decorated Royal Navy Officer, had already led two previous arctic expeditions to chart the northern regions of Hudson’s bay in Canada. His first, the Coppermine River expedition in 1819, was plagued by vague orders, poor organisation, unreliable supplies and a dependence on guides with whom there was no solid relationship they could depend on. Additionally, the members of the expedition were completely unschooled in Arctic travel and survival, such that the project ended in complete disaster, with over half of the party perishing, while the remainder were barely rescued in time by Yellow-knife indigenous tribesmen. Despite his brush with disaster and criticism from some quarters, Franklin’s harrowing account of the ordeal became a best seller and any suggestion of incompetence was brushed off as bad luck. Indeed, Franklin himself appeared to have learned little from this experience apart from the conviction that it would have fared better if more money, men and supplies had been thrown at it (as opposed to cultivating a relationship with the natives and adopting their survival techniques). Indeed, Franklin viewed the failure as being largely the result of an overreliance on external support, rather than self-sufficiency and good-old British derring-do. He firmly believed such expeditions should be the domain of well provisioned and disciplined Navy men who would operate as cogs in a juggernaut machine that would overcome all obstacles through sheer determination and improvisation. This attitude would come to define the British approach to exploration in general, and Polar exploration in particular
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