A Lonely Cenotaph to Lost Searchers

One of the remarkable monuments at Beechey Island, connected with the searches for the Sir John Franklin 1845 expedition, is the “Franklin Cenotaph.” It may be the oldest cenotaph – an incredibly early example of a memorial that commemorates sailors individually by name – in Canada. This distinctive monument is located inland of the ruins of Northumberland House and the fallen mast of Sir John Ross’s yacht Mary. Beechey Island is an isolated, barren place, just off the southwest coast of Devon Island, in the High Arctic, in present-day Nunavut. It had been the site of the Franklin Expedition’s first winter encampment, when HM ships Erebus and Terror had sought shelter here in 1845 and been frozen-in. In 1846, before the ice released the ships, three members of the Expedition were buried just up the beach. The area later became prominent as a staging base/supply depot in the expeditions sent to try and ascertain the fate of Franklin and his crews. Today, this incredibly remote 170-year old cenotaph serves as a lasting memorial to the human cost of these efforts.

A brief description of the monument could be: A column now white but sometimes black, in the form of an octagonal piece of ships’ machinery, affixed with plaques, with a larger one predominating, surmounted by a large finial (ball), the column approached by a marble slab on a concrete base, with the whole raised on a small platform of cemented limestone. The Belcher column and Bellot’s monument AND Lady Franklin’s memorial plaque have a unique history, like many other relics, ruins, graves, and wrecks at Beechey. This composite monument, often simplified to “the Franklin Cenotaph,” was begun in June 1854 by the crew of HMS North Star, under the command of W.J.S. Pullen. Its original intent was to honour sailors who had perished in the great efforts to locate the crews of Franklin’s vanished ships. North Star was serving as a depot and stores vessel for the larger Royal Navy search effort, Sir Edward Belcher, commanding.

This new “Belcher column” adhered to the classical definition of a cenotaph: It memorialized the dead without being a burial site. By commemorating enlisted personnel – sailors and marines – it was also incredibly rare for its time.* Small plaques on each face of the column identify 13 deceased members of HM ships Investigator, Resolute, Assistance, Intrepid, whose remains were buried elsewhere.** These men are not all commemorated in the same manner; some entries are descriptive, some employ religious passages, some are brief.

The column was reportedly made out of the interior section (the spindle) of the capstan of the American whaling ship McLellan. McLellan had been lost two years previously, on 8 July 1852 on the way to Arctic whaling grounds, in Melville Sound, when it and a fleet of British whaling ships had been frozen in pack ice, alongside Belcher’s small Royal Navy squadron, then journeying up to begin the search. McLellan had run afoul of North Star. It was then crushed by fast moving ice. The vessel must have remained on the surface or pinned to the ice for some time, as much seems to have been salvaged. McLellan’s spars would also be a source of timbers used to construct Northumberland House, the large storehouse constructed soon after the ships got to Beechey.***

The second major component of the monument was added later that summer to memorialize Lt. Joseph-René Bellot. Bellot, an officer of the French Navy, had accompanied Captain Edward Augustus Inglefield, commanding HMS Phoenix, on the same 1853 journey to resupply Belcher’s ships that resulted in the loss of the Breadalbane supply ship nearby.

Bellot was a seasoned Arctic explorer who had already been out as second in command on the 1851 William Kennedy expedition. He was respected and admired by his comrades. As Phoenix and Breadalbane were driven away from Beechey, in a gale, he had volunteered to brave the ice and elements to carry despatches north to Wellington Channel, to deliver them to Belcher. Bellot disappeared 18 August, when the ice suddenly opened around him. This loss was felt deeply by the searchers in the Arctic.

In August 1854, when Inglefield returned to the Arctic on the next resupply effort, he brought up a plaque dedicated to the memory of Bellot to be added to the Belcher column. The plaque had been commissioned by an important friend, Sir John Barrow, (Second Secretary at the Admiralty and the second Barrow heavily involved in polar exploration) and was cast in a headstone-like shape.

Francis Leopold McClintock’s search expedition of 1858 brought up the last major addition to the monument: A large marble slab commissioned by Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John Franklin’s widow. The marble was inscribed with text dedicating it “To the Memory of Franklin, Crozier, Fitzjames, and all their gallant brother officers and faithful companions…” This, aptly, concluded the memorialization program on the monument by incorporating the lost explorers into the monument to the lost searchers of those explorers. The marble was to have been brought north in 1855 by an American expedition looking for Dr. Kane, commanded by Lt. Henry J. Hartstene. That expedition turned back when they located Kane, so the plaque waited at Disko, Greenland, for three years. McClintock’s expedition routed it on up (with an additional small plaque added to reference this) and deposited the marble flat on the ground in front of the column.

One of the original oddities of the monument is the metal “Post Office” letterbox panel affixed to a rear surface. Despite the prevalence of seances in Victorian England, this was not intended as a correspondence box to the lost, to communicate with the spirit world. According to an October 1854 London Illustrated News article, which featured a sketch of the monument, this letterbox was actually functional, intended for future visitors to leave letters as a receipt of having visited the Island.

In 1876, Allen Young, in HMS Pandora, revisited Beechey’s lonely shores. He had last been there while serving as Navigator on Fox, McClintock’s ship. He took a valuable photographic record of the site that was incorporated into his published journal.**** At this time the monument was painted black. Young described opening the letterbox on the monument to retrieve a single document. Pen pals were in short supply at Beechey, and the only contents were a memo left by Belcher more than two decades before.

The cenotaph, like so many other relics, wrecks, and remains at Beechey, seems to have mostly escaped the ravages of time. A half-century after its installation, in August 1904, the Canadian ship DGS Neptune visited Beechey, as part of the Dominion Government Expedition, A.P. Low commanding. This visit saw expedition members raise the marble plaque for a photograph and then reorient it to face upwards (Low’s interesting description of Beechey and the cenotaph is in this 1906 report). At this time a flagpole may have been installed at the rear or very near the monument.

During the 1922-23 visit to the monument, on one of Captain J.E. Bernier’s yearly voyages/sovereignty patrols north in CGS Arctic, the marble appears to have been set into a more secure and aesthetically pleasing angled concrete base. The head of the marble now rested just under the Bellot plaque. Other than the removal of the flagpole, and the application of white paint, the memorial has remained substantially unaltered since then. It continues to stand tall in a lonely vigil at Beechey, down through the decades. Today, the Franklin Cenotaph is a powerful site of memory connected with the search for the Northwest Passage, and an important tribute to the men who died far from home looking for lost comrades.

Please see our 2024/03 update to this story, where we used an archival source, William Mumford’s diary, to determine more accurate provenance of the column to a different part id the McLellan whaling ship. We still have many questions about the monument, including what dates sections of the monument were altered or rebuilt, why the small plaques were sometimes missing from archival photos, and the subsequent history of archeology at the monument. There are many discrepancies in the sources, and we know there are folks out there who know more than us, so we are happy to stand corrected! We also hope this post spurs greater study of this important memorial. If you’ve visited Beechey Island, we’d love to see your photos!

*This cenotaph may even be unique on Canada. We have never heard of one that commemorates not just senior officers but the regular sailors and marines of military ships, erected before the 20th century. A hundred years earlier, the terrible loss of more than a thousand officers and enlisted men, when HMS Victory (1737-1744) sank in the English Channel, had resulted in the kind of traditional commemoration to the leader, Admiral Sir John Balchen, at Westminster Abbey. The oldest naval monument now located in Canada is Montreal’s Lord Horatio Nelson column ( constructed 1809).

**Thomas Morgan of HMS Investigator, who died 1854-05-22 onboard North Star, is buried nearby with the three original Franklin crewmembers. Aside from Morgan and Bellot (who is commemorated twice on this monument), the other members of search crews memorialized on the column (with their ships and dates of death) are: William Cutbush HMS Assistance 1853-02-27; Isaac Barnett HMS Assistance 1854-01-28; George Harris HMS Assistance 1854-01-09, John Ames, HMS Investigator 1853-04-11; John Boyle HMS Investigator 1853-04-05; H.H. Sainsbury HMS Investigator 1853-11-14; Thomas Morley HMS Resolute 1852-10-19; George Drover HMS Intrepid 1852-12-12; John Coombs HMS Intrepid 1853-05-12; Thomas Hood HMS Intrepid 1854-01-02; John Kerr HMS Investigator 1853-04-13; James Wilkie HMS Intrepid 1854-02-2. These names can be verified at Maritime Memorials at RMG.

***Brian D. Powell Polar Record 42 Issue 4 provides a detailed summary of the construction of this and other monuments at Beechey, and there is still more work to do on the commemorative intent of the various monuments. Other evidence for the source of the Belcher column, the whaling ship McLellan, is found in Barr and Stein’s January 2017 article “Frederick J. Krabbé, last man to see HMS Investigator afloat, May 1854” Journal of the Hakluyt Society. We have usually encountered spindles with ten or more sides as part of naval capstans.

****Young had been sent in HMS Pandora to aid the 1875-76 British Arctic Expedition, which encountered many difficulties. Young’s ship, a reinforced gunboat, would be acquired as USS Jeanette for the Grealy expedition, which ended in more shipwreck and tragedy. His account The Two Voyages of the Pandora ; 1875-76 has a chapter (pp. 43-46) about Beechey with a brief description of the letter box, Northumberland House, the Mary yacht left by Sir John Ross, and other boats on the site: https://archive.org/embed/cu31924091208565