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John Richardson's ‘missing’ Arctic journal, 6–29 October 1821

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2018

Janice Cavell
Janice Cavell*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, CanadaK1S 5B6 ([email protected])
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Abstract

The 1819–1822 overland Arctic expedition led by John Franklin was one of the most disastrous in polar history. In 1821, 20 men travelled to the Arctic Ocean by way of the Coppermine River; only nine of them survived. John Richardson's expedition journal, as published by C. Stuart Houston in 1984, is incomplete. There are no entries between 7 and 29 October 1821, even though five of the 11 deaths (some or possibly all of them by murder) occurred during this critical period. The omission of these events from the journal on which Houston's edition was based has raised suspicions that the account published in Franklin's 1823 narrative may be inaccurate. This article prints the ‘missing’ journal entries, which were located in the files of the Colonial Office, and analyses the differences between these previously unknown entries and the 1823 account.

Type
Research Article
Information
Polar Record , Volume 53 , Issue 6 , November 2017 , pp. 617 - 630
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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