27. A little spoon with a big story.

This is the story of a silver spoon recovered and given as one of three, to whaling Captain Potter by an Inuit woman. The silver spoon bore the crest of Sir John Franklin, but it had been broken near the bowl and then very crudely repaired using a strip of copper and two rivets (Cooper, 1961, p. 223).  Its unique appearance made its identification very easy.

The spoon was sent to Miss Cracroft, niece of Sir John Franklin by whaling Captain Barry, who had brought it to the USA. Captain Barry reported that in 1871-73 while frozen in aboard the ship Glacier at Repulse Bay, he learned from some Inuit of a stranger in uniform with many men who had visited them. The men died but their chief had collected many papers and had hidden them in a cairn along with silver spoons. Captain Barry also reported that in 1876 he was wintering with the bark A. Houghton at Marble Island in Hudson’s Bay when he was visited by an Inut who reported a great white man had been amongst them who wrote in a book similar to the ships log book and gave him the silver spoon. These reports led to Lieutenant Schwatka organising an expedition to summer search King William Island for the lost Franklin records.

The ship that carried the five-man Schwatka party to the Arctic was under the command of Captain Barry. On arrival, Schwatka attempted to verify Barry’s story. There he met Captain Potter who proved to be the original recipient of three silver spoons, one of which was identical to that reported by Barry and which had ‘disappeared’.  Clearly Barry’s story was a fabrication and Gilder (1881, p. 39) wrote of their disappointment:

‘In this crucible of fact the famous spoon melted. So far as Captain Barry and his clews were concerned, we had come on a fool’s errand’.

However Lieutenant Schwatka was made of stern material and he decided to proceed and led his party to achieve the longest sledge journey ever recorded  at that time, being absent from their base for 11 months and 20 days and covering 2,819 geographical miles or 3,251 statute miles. The expedition relied for food for men and dogs on their hunting abilities and because they consumed the same raw meat and blubber diet as the Inuit.

A silver spoon belonging to Sir John Franklin and crudely repaired with copper is enigmatic and carries yet another story. Its table use by Sir John Franklin in dining would not have broken the spoon.   However before the retreat began the iron utensils used by the crews were replaced with the silver of the officers. They were given to the crew, some of whom scratched their initials on them.  Presumably if any of the silver got back to England, then they could be bought back and recovered by the officer’s families. There would have been barely enough silver to go around the 15 officers and 90 seamen who started the retreat.  It seems this spoon was issued to a crewman who on the retreat used it as a tool and broke it. There was no possibility on the retreat for repairing the spoon as every effort was needed to move the boat sledges – an effort that proved too much for the crews to get them into the estuary of Back’s Great Fish River.

So how and when did the broken spoon get repaired? There is only one possibility. The crude repair work was carried out aboard HMS Erebus whose workshops would be intact at the time of the retreat, whereas HMS Terror may have been abandoned on her beam ends. The broken spoon must have been carried back to Erebus by the return party believed to be led by Captains Crozier and Fitzjames.  Once aboard Erebus the crewman had the next two years to make the repair.  So it was likely repaired with copper sometime in 1848-50, after the ship had been worked south to lie off Cape Crozier within sight of the camp at Terror Bay. Later Erebus was moved south and finally abandoned near O’Reilly’s Island off the coast of the Adelaide Peninsula. Inuit testimony describes how she was driven ashore by ice and salvaged for many years until the year before Captain McClintock arrived in 1859.  He was told that an old woman and a boy had last visited the wreck that was ashore in Utjulik only the previous year.  The repaired spoon is likely to have been removed with other useful cutlery by the Inuit after she was abandoned.

QUESTION. If Erebus was ashore in 1858, when was she ice rafted offshore to sink in her present position?