The song was so beautifully haunting it used to give me goose bumps every time I heard it.

So when I read that the Greenwich Maritime Museum were hosting an exhibition called ‘Death in the Ice’ that solved some of the mystery behind the disappearance of Lord Franklins Expedition to the pole in 1845, I couldn’t wait to see. It also made me want to sing the song again, which actually I have done now with the band Lot 49 (sometimes to be found lurking around The Hemmingford Arms in Islington)

In case you don’t know the story of Lord Franklin, he set sail with two ships called HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to an un-navigated section of the North West passage in 1845, but the two ships became icebound for three years in Victoria Strait near King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. Back in Britain no one knew what had happened.

The song is told through the eyes of his wife Jane Franklin who was left bereft. The last verse reads:

And now my burden it gives me pain
For my long lost Franklin I would cross the main
A ten thousand pounds would I freely give
To say on earth that my Franklin lives

In fact Lady Jane Franklin along with the Admiralty launched a search party for the ships in 1848 offering a reward for news. The news wasn’t good since the entire crew of 129 men had died. In 1850 the first relics of the expedition were found though, including the graves of some the crew.

But the fascinating thing this exhibition reveals is that in 2014 the wreck of HMS Erebus was found lying in Nunavut a part of the Arctic Ocean that belongs to Canada’s northern most territory. The ship’s bell, part of its wheel, china plates, a cannon and a ceramic pot that says “anchovy paste” were pretty well preserved too, probably because of the cold waters.

However, my friend Andy pointed out something in the photographs that really made me think. When the discovery of the ship was made it showed a clear blue sky, waters that were calm and there was no ice anywhere. The scientists who had been searching for the ship were in T-shirts. This was not a frozen landscape.

Could it really be that in the 126 years since the expedition took place that the ice that kept two ships and one hundred and twenty -nine men stranded had completely disappeared?

Suddenly the ‘Long lost Franklin’ of the song, seemed to live and breathe once more revealing not only the mysteries of the expedition but also how we are interacting with a planet that is warming up as it shares it’s long lost secrets.

If you are interested I found a version of the song by ‘Pentangle’ here. (external link)