The Beechey Papers

Following Alison Freebairn's 2019 rediscovery of the Beechey Papers, I travelled to London to photograph these Franklin Expedition relics – after the Beechey Island graves, the only written records recovered from the first winter camp.

To read her brief overview of the Beechey Papers, click here.

To organize the papers, I have numbered all non-newsprint fragments as "BP-1" through "BP-12", based on the original order they appear in the archive.  Where a Beechey Paper has two sides visible, I have added "A" and "B" suffixes to the file names to denote this.


BP-01-A

BP-01-B

BP-02-A, B:  Handwriting present.  Believed to be magnetic observations, and identified by John Barrow Jr. as being James Fitzjames' handwriting.

BP-03-A:  Handwriting present.  Name of "Mr. McDonald", Assistant Surgeon on HMS Terror.

BP-03-B

 
BP-04-A, B:  Handwriting present on Side A.  Believed to be "to be called".

 
BP-05-A, B

BP-06-A:  Handwriting present.  Mathematical notations.

BP-06-B:  Handwriting present.  Mathematical notations.

BP-07

BP-07 (polarized for readability)

 
BP-08-A, B

BP-09:  Handwriting present.  

BP-09 (saturated to highlight the writing)

BP-10, 11:  BP-10 above (in two or more fragments) with BP 11 below.  Handwriting present.  

BP-11:  Detail of the debated words.

BP-12:  Handwriting present.  This is only the more analyzed segment of the larger paper.