Acronym:

ojf

Name:

Order of Sir John Franklin

Type:

Clan

Age:

6

Games:

0 (0 per day)

Date Registered:

December 27, 2017, 10:30 AM

Number of members:

0

Status:

Dead

Sir John Franklin, (born April 16, 1786, Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England—died June 11, 1847, near King William Island, British Arctic Islands [now in Nunavut territory, Canada]), English rear admiral and explorer who led an ill-fated expedition (1845) in search of the Northwest Passage, a Canadian Arctic waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Franklin is also the subject of a biography by Sir John Richardson that was originally published in 1856 in the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Franklin entered the Royal Navy at age 14, accompanied Matthew Flinders on his exploratory voyage to Australia (1801–03), and served in the Battles of Trafalgar (1805) and New Orleans (1815). He commanded the Trent on Capt. David Buchan’s Arctic expedition of 1818, which sought to reach the North Pole.

From 1819 to 1822 Franklin conducted an overland expedition from the western shore of Hudson Bay to the Arctic Ocean, and he surveyed part of the coast to the east of the Coppermine River in northwestern Canada. After his return to England, he published Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819, 20, 21 and 22 (1823).

On a second overland expedition to the same region (1825–27), Franklin led a party that explored the North American coast westward from the mouth of the Mackenzie River, in northwestern Canada, to Point Beechey, now in Alaska. A second party followed the coast eastward from the Mackenzie to the Coppermine. These efforts, which added new knowledge of about 1,200 miles (1,932 km) of the northwest rim of the North American coastline, were described in Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1825, 1826, and 1827 (1828). Knighted in 1829, Franklin served as governor of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, from 1836 to 1843.