Why would a small red-and-white balloon rescued from a Victorian shrubbery in the west of England have excited weeks of feverish activity at the Admiralty in London? Because it appeared to have attached to it a message from the doomed HMS Erebus, captained by Sir John Franklin, by then missing for six years in the Arctic.
If the message was genuine, it meant that Britain’s greatest mariner of the day and his 130 crew – or at least some remnant of the expedition – were still alive, locked in the ice of the North-West Passage. It meant new efforts should be made to rescue them.
The Admiralty hushed up the affair of the Gloucester balloon and it remains curiously ignored to this day. The message was almost certainly a hoax. But who perpetrated it? And for what purpose? And where did the hoaxer get the Admiralty-issue balloon?
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On the morning of 5 October 1851, a strange balloon was spotted floating over the cathedral city of Gloucester in the west of England. By lunchtime it had reached the outskirts of the city, where it descended gently into the shrubbery of a certain Mrs Russell of Wotton Lodge. Curious, she dispatched one of her servants to retrieve it.
The silk balloon, partially filled with gas, was less than a metre across and carried a small, soiled card declaring: “Erebus. 112°W. Long: 71°N. Lat. September 3rd 1851. Blocked in.” That was it. Nothing more.
Everyone knew the name Erebus. Sir John Franklin was one of the great public heroes of the age. His two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, had left Britain to find the elusive North-West Passage. Franklin’s expedition had sailed six years before – with three years’ supplies. By now, hopes that anyone might still be alive were fading fast.
The previous winter half a dozen rescue ships from Britain and the US had combed the countless channels and bays of the Canadian Arctic, but found no trace of the vessels or their crews. Many would-be rescuers were convinced that Franklin and his men must be dead – frozen, starved, even, some said, eaten by Eskimos. But the public was still obsessed with the story, which filled the newspapers and became the subject of popular ballads. In the final refrain of the haunting Lady Franklin’s Lament, the explorer’s wife promises a fortune for her husband’s safe return: “Ten thousand pounds would I freely give, to say on Earth that my Franklin do live.”
And Jane Franklin, a determined and resourceful woman, would certainly have paid that. She devoted several years to berating the Admiralty into sending rescue missions and flattering a motley collection of whaling captains and adventurers into offering their services. But by the autumn of 1851, the Admiralty was increasingly unwilling to fund and organise the search.
And then the balloon turned up. The story of what happened next has been pieced together by W. Gillies Ross, an expert on Arctic exploration at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec. Delving among old Admiralty papers, Ross discovered that, while extremely reticent in public, in the weeks after Mrs Russell sent them the balloon the Admiralty embarked on a feverish investigation into the provenance of the apparent message from HMS Erebus.
Such a balloon, the Admiralty concluded, could have made the journey, and the location in the message could have been correct. But as it now turns out, the ship couldn’t have been iced in at the position given in the note, because it’s in the middle of Victoria Island. But no one knew that then. What’s more, there was no record of Franklin taking any balloons with him. Certainly he took none like the one Mrs Russell recovered.
The balloon seemed to come from a batch made for civil engineer George Shepherd, who supplied them to several of the rescue vessels that headed north in 1850. According to Ross, the aim was to release them across the Arctic with notes telling where provisions and assistance could be found, in the hope that Franklin would find one.
Could one of the rescuers have sent a hoax message from the Arctic? It seemed possible, though the condition of the card and the attaching twine suggested it had not made a long journey. Some suspicion fell on the officers of an Admiralty rescue ship skippered by Captain Horatio Austin which had been carrying balloons and returned from the Arctic in the weeks before the balloon’s discovery. The Admiralty claimed to find no evidence that balloons were missing from the ship, though as Ross points out, if they did, one could hardly blame them if they decided to hush it up.
Certainly, the ship’s officers would have had the opportunity. But where, as any detective would ask at this point, was the motive? Ross can see none. Besides, the wording of the message does not suggest a nautical hand. The name of the ship was not preceded by the letter HMS; the words “blocked in” were not part of naval jargon; and the longitude was given before the latitude – all contrary to naval custom. And the coordinates did not include the more precise minutes and seconds – again suggesting an amateur hand.
So who else had the opportunity? Balloons like this were not widely available. Most had been made specifically for Shepherd. He had released some during trials in London before they were dispatched to the Arctic. One of these might have been retrieved and reused. But, as Ross points out, Shepherd also gave out several balloons as souvenirs to VIPs in attendance. He gave one to the President of the Civil Engineers’ Institute, another to someone from the Royal Society – and two to Lady Franklin.
Now Jane Franklin, alone of all the people who might have got hold of one of the balloons, had a clear motive for such a hoax. A forceful woman of 60, she had fought for the rights of female convicts while her husband was governor of Tasmania. She travelled widely on her own account, and after her husband’s disappearance had orchestrated the rescue effort, almost single-handed.
Could she have committed the deed in the hope of forcing the Admiralty to renew its flagging rescue efforts? “Such a stunt might almost be in character; she was incredibly determined, devious in some ways and could manipulate politicians,” says Ross, though he admits to having no idea who the culprit was.
The identity and motive of the hoaxer will probably never be known. But Lady Franklin must be a prime suspect. She alone had the opportunity and the motive. And she certainly had the wit and guile.
- Further reading: The Gloucester balloon: a communication from Franklin? by W. Gillies Ross, Polar Record, vol 38, p 11 (2002)
