If there's one thing the British love more than a hero, it's a heroic failure. Few individuals fit this category better than the 19th-century polar explorer Sir John Franklin. If his memorial in London's Waterloo Place is to be believed, he cut an impressive figure: firm-jawed and barrel-chested, his statue gazes towards the horizon as if searching for new worlds to conquer. The reality was very different.
A podgy, balding Royal Navy officer, by the age of 40 he had already achieved an unenviable kind of fame, after he led an overland expedition to chart the north coast of Canada, during which half his men starved to death and Franklin himself earned the nickname The Man Who Ate His Boots. But it wasn't until he led another Arctic expedition in 1845, this time to find the fabled Northwest Passage, that Franklin truly became a household name, although again this was because of what he had failed to do rather than what he had done.
A search party found a chronometer, four teaspoons, and some human bones that had been gnawed on by human teeth
Several years after he should have returned, a search party stumbled across a sad trail of relics in the snow, including a chronometer, four teaspoons, and a copy of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, together with some human bones that had been gnawed on by human teeth. What had begun as a voyage into the icy unknown had apparently turned into a real-life Heart of Darkness. Despite angry protestations from such influential figures as Charles Dickens, and a determined one-woman campaign by his widow Lady Jane, it looked suspiciously as if Franklin (or one of his crew) had become The Man Who Ate His Men.
