Posts on Dark Arctic Secrets

Portrait of Lady Franklin - A Visit to America

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A portrait of Lady Franklin from the 1870 American newspapers.

By the time Lady Franklin visited the one Cincinnati man who had answers, she had spent 25 years piecing together what had happened to her husband’s expedition. No record of it survives in her journals. Her biographer, Frances Woodward, who had Lady Franklin’s journals, put it plainly: “It is known only from subsequent correspondence and the press that Jane met Hall in Cincinnati in July and at Mr. Grinnell’s house in August…” (Portrait of Jane, 1951). Russell Potter, taking Woodward’s hint, confirmed the Cincinnati meeting and identified a date for the New York meeting.

'An Old Cannibal Story', Rediscovered After 142 Years

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A wave of newspaper articles from 1884 preserves what Charles Francis Hall learned about Franklin’s men. Nothing like it appears in any other source.

Some mysteries thin over time. Not Franklin.

Since late July 1845, when whalers last saw Sir John Franklin and his 129 men anchored to an iceberg in Baffin Bay, new people have continually been drawn to unraveling what happened next to this ill-fated group of explorers. In all the speculation that exists, one theory has remained buried - that the cannibalism was pre-planned and a unanimous decision was made amongst the men to select one of their own to be eaten.