By Logan Zachary. April 6, 2025.
{ The inscription in 2018. }
The above photograph was a lucky shot taken at the exhibition Death In The Ice in 2018. Lowering my camera, the ceiling lights at Mystic Seaport reflected just enough to light up the paint, illuminating the notoriously faint inscription.
For comparison, observe the National Maritime Museum’s own studio photograph of this same Franklin Expedition relic, taken where this artefact normally resides in Greenwich, London.
{ Left © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (detail). }
The museum’s photograph is more accurate to what this relic looks like in person — but without the reflection on the paint, it is effectively unreadable. Greenwich’s photography department is usually excellent for including extra detail shots of inscriptions, but in this case they evidently didn’t spot the markings.
This same issue once wasted the time of the most original mind ever to investigate the Franklin Expedition. Dave Woodman, while preparing his first book, thought he might have an entirely different boat on his hands when Greenwich curators told him that they could find no markings whatsoever in their photographs of the relic. It wasn’t until after publication that the presence of the inscription was rediscovered (Walpole 2017; Stenton & Park 2017).
Nor does shining a direct light on the inscription necessarily help. Below shows what happened in 2019, when the local 9 o’clock news toured the same exhibition in Mystic Seaport that I had, briefly pointing their camera right at the boat stem’s inscription. The deep shadow cast reveals that they were using a TV spotlight, and yet – while this is more accurate to what the relic looks like in person – it is not readable.
{ Broadcast WTNH-New Haven. }
The unlikeliest of TV stars: of all the curious Franklin relics in Death In The Ice to spotlight, I take my hat off to WTNH-New Haven for giving the Erebus Bay boat stem its first primetime solo appearance.
It’s one of those Franklin relics that is shocking to learn has survived at all. A stem is the very front of a vessel, the sturdy piece coming up from the keel to cut through the water (seen sticking up prominently in the sketch below). The Erebus Bay boat stem is not from just any boat: it is the largest surviving fragment of the boat from “the Boat Place” on Qikiqtaq / ᕿᑭᖅᑕᖅ (King William Island).
{ ▽ The discovery of the Boat Place on Erebus Bay. }
{ Boat stem visible just left of center. }
Located by search parties on the shores of Erebus Bay in 1859, the boat held the skeletal remains of two sailors from the Franklin Expedition, as well as a mystifying array of relics taken on their journey: curtain rods, chocolate, handkerchiefs, slippers, a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield, a New Testament in French, two loaded guns (propped against the side of the boat, as seen in these sketches), and much, much else. The boat was atop a sledge for hauling across land and ice, and when found was pointing northeast, effectively back in the direction where Franklin’s ships had been locked into the ice (McClintock 1859).
This same Boat Place has been back in the news in recent years, for the new DNA identifications that have been filling in details regarding the expedition’s demise. In 2021, archaeologist Douglas Stenton and his team identified the engineer from HMS Erebus, John Gregory, as one of the men who had died at the Boat Place (Stenton et al. 2021). In 2024, Stenton’s team also identified Captain James Fitzjames’ remains at a similar site about a mile away (Stenton et al. 2024).
{ ▽ The discovery of the Boat Place. }
The search that had originally found the Boat Place in 1859 was led by F. Leopold McClintock, but it was his lieutenant, William R. Hobson, who first discovered the site. In his report to his captain, Lieutenant Hobson said of the boat that, “There were some markings on her stem, but I could not decipher them” (Stenton 2014).
Fortunately, McClintock and his sledging team arrived afterwards and did record the markings. They would be published later that year in his expedition book, The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas.
{ ▽ From McClintock’s The Voyage of the Fox (1st edition). }
The Voyage of the Fox sorted out much of the meaning of the inscription. Its function for the boat was analogous to something that we in the automobile age would recognize: a license plate. In much the same position, it gives details such as time and place to those who can understand its markings.
{ ▽ Detail of the boat stem sketch, The Voyage of the Fox (1st edition). }
From The Voyage of the Fox:
“The only markings about the boat were those cut in upon her stem ; besides giving her length, they indicated that she was built by contract, numbered 61, and received into Woolwich Dockyard in April, 184—; the fourth figure to the right hand was lost, as the stem had been reduced as much as possible in order to lessen her weight ; from this cause part of the Roman numerals indicating her length were also lost.”
[McClintock 1869, 3rd edition.]
From this description, the six lines can be roughly categorized as:
Length: XXII (or XXVIII).Place: Woolwich.Build: Contract.Number: 61.Month: April.Year: 184–.
The sketch in The Voyage of the Fox forgot to include the 4th line, “N61” (see image below). Though discussed in the text, this omission was never corrected in subsequent editions.
{ The Voyage of the Fox’s sketch compared. }
However, a different part of this sketch was soon amended (Stenton & Park 2017): the Roman numerals in the first line.
The sketch in the first edition of McClintock’s book represented these figures as “XXII” for “22” — naturally enough, as that is what they appear to be (see above).
But if the Roman numerals did indeed represent the length of the boat, then this number “XXII” cannot be right. Both McClintock and Hobson had measured the boat as being 28 feet long, not 22 feet. [The independence of their measurements is suggested by their very slight (3 inch) disagreement on the boat’s width.]
How to resolve this? I believe the first stroke of the 2nd “X” is also the first stroke of an additional character “V”. This effectively creates a new combined single character, representing “XV”. In his own sledging field journal from 1859, McClintock drew these three strokes as distinctly connected (NMM/MCL/19/2).
In this way, “XXVIII” for “28” is possible. What we see today is thus “XXVI”, or “26”. The final two characters “II” (to reach 28) were lost when, as McClintock said, the stem was reduced to lessen her weight.
{ GIF animation of the combined “XV”. }
The potential “V” does markedly resemble the angles of the “W” in the line below it. But perhaps the strongest evidence supporting this interpretation is that it would explain why the surviving lines initially resembling “II” here are not drawn parallel to one another.
The Voyage of the Fox corrected the “XXII” interpretation for the boat stem sketch in the 2nd edition (not the 3rd as has been suggested). For some odd typographical reason, a serifed font was employed, effectively muddling what was intended. During McClintock’s lifetime, five more editions of The Voyage of the Fox would be released by his publisher (John Murray of London), but this sketch was never again altered.
{ XXII vs. XXVI. }
{ Image courtesy Douglas Wamsley. }
The sketch was found in a packet of McClintock’s papers discovered by a painting crew, when pulling out a bookcase at an old London book dealer in 1998 (Lentz 2003). [The wording on the sketch is: “Remains of white paint” and “black”.]
The other side of this same piece of paper has something unique: a rubbing of the boat stem inscription, today held by polar author Douglas Wamsley.
In the juxtaposition below, the rubbing is set in the center. On the right is a further depiction of the boat stem inscription, located by Alison Freebairn in McClintock’s papers at Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum (MCL/45/1).
{ ▽ Right inset image NMM/MCL/45/1, photo by Alison Freebairn. }
{ Center inset image courtesy Douglas Wamsley. }
The copy found by Freebairn was created by Sir Frederick Evans, Hydrographer of the Navy, in 1881 (see Appendix 2). Oddly it is not entirely spatially accurate, yet it makes some additional notations that were not highlighted on the original rubbing held by Wamsley. Among these, it draws in the minor mark after “N61”, which Douglas Stenton and Robert Park (2017) speculated may have been part of a digit “5” or “7”. Strangely, the Evans copy also fully draws in what is obviously a mere crack in the wood (connecting lines 1 & 2).
Much like facsimiles of the Victory Point Record, these two copies of the boat stem inscription would be priceless if the original hadn’t survived. However these are vastly rarer: never published, they are apparently the only two boat stem inscription “facsimiles” in existence. Fortunately the originals of both the Victory Point Record and the Erebus Bay boat stem do still survive in Greenwich’s collection today.
* * *
Over 150 years after the Erebus Bay boat stem inscription was first recorded, this arcane topic came back to life. In 2010, having just found the wreck of the Franklin search ship HMS Investigator, Parks Canada made another extraordinary recovery on land: a fragment of the stem from one of HMS Investigator’s boats — with part of the inscription still intact.
{ ▽ Parks Canada. Thierry Boyer. 2010. }
{ ▽ Parks Canada/Terrestrial Archaeology. }
The middle surviving line is the well-known “broad arrow,” denoting British government property, as famously seen on the davit pintle and bell from HMS Erebus. The lower line “W” presumably again stands for “Woolwich”, as McClintock determined regarding the Erebus Bay boat stem.
{ Inset image: Parks Canada/Terrestrial Archaeology. }
{ Comparison not to scale. }
The surviving first line appears to be “XII”. This time, the final two characters “II” are perfectly parallel: there is no hint of a potential “V” as seen on the Erebus Bay boat stem.
And as surprising as this discovery is, the boat’s stem from Investigator may not be the end of this unusual topic. The wreck of HMS Terror was discovered in 2016, and on the seabed just off her port stern still rests one of her boats, measured by Parks Canada at 23 feet in length (Betts 2022).
{ ▽ Parks Canada. Thierry Boyer. 2017. }
A photograph from 2017 of the boat’s stem, taken by the dive team’s photographer Thierry Boyer via a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), tantalizingly hints at possible inscription marks peeking through a thin carpet of sea life.
{ ▽ Right image: Parks Canada. Thierry Boyer. 2010. }
{ Comparison not to scale. }
It is possible that, in the future, Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeology Team may add another new inscription to this extremely limited collection.
The End.
– L.Z. April 6, 2025.
My thanks to Douglas Wamsley, Jonathan Moore, Sharon Thomson, and Alison Freebairn for each bringing together the imagery necessary to create this article. In addition to their reviews and commentary, this article also benefited from thoughtful reviews by Douglas Stenton, Margaret Bertulli, Olga Kimmins, Russ Taichman, Matthew Betts, and Dave Woodman.
* * *
Appendix 1: Additional notes on the “XV” symbol.
As mentioned in the main article, McClintock’s sledging journal from 1859 drew the “XV” symbol with all three strokes connected (NMM/MCL/19/2). And yet, when The Voyage of the Fox is then released later that same year, not only are the Roman numerals depicted in the sketch as merely “XXII”, McClintock’s paragraph explaining the stem inscription never discusses the first line – nor any Roman numerals – at all.
The sketch was amended for the 2nd edition, and then the Roman numerals were finally discussed in the 3rd edition — by which point, McClintock is bluntly describing them as “indicating her length.” It is important to note that the 2nd edition is characterized by updates that didn’t require altering the original textual layout from the 1st edition. The 3rd edition broke this mold, allowing McClintock much greater flexibility to make alterations. Given all this: I would presume that McClintock in the field in 1859 did not comprehend the meaning of the inscription’s first line — but that the accuracy of his journal’s sketch allowed the solution to be determined later, presumably back in England. That solution (or at least certainty) just wasn’t in time for the first editions of his book. [An identical trajectory follows the 2nd and 3rd editions realizing that Fitzjames not Gore wrote the first entry on the Victory Point Record; see Zachary 2021.]
Why would the boat’s length be written in Roman numerals, when the rest of the inscription uses Arabic numerals? I have no naval expertise to answer this question, however it is certain that sailors of this era were well-accustomed to the former system: from Parks Canada’s photography, it is clear that the draught marks on Erebus, Terror, and Investigator were all depicted using Roman numerals. Matthew Betts observes that both of these instances (length and draught) represent measurements. Considering this, it is also worth noting that Roman numerals are significantly easier to modify than Arabic numerals: additional strokes can be added to incrementally raise (and even lower) a number. [For example: on a mental chalkboard, try adding or subtracting one to “XX” as opposed to “20”.] This malleability would be a useful feature for a navy habituated to modifying its ships and boats.
I had considered whether the 2nd “X” had simply been forgotten, and thus the combined “XV” symbol was a clever way of fitting in one more “X”. But Matthew Betts proposed a more likely scenario: that the combined symbol would be a useful abbreviation on any piece of narrow real estate, such as a boat’s stem. This dovetails well with the idea of the Navy appreciating the adaptability of Roman numerals, as well as the simple fact that – at six characters in width – “XXVIII” would require more space than any other line in the boat stem’s inscription.
{ The stem’s old Royal Naval Museum label (AAA2282.1). }
{ © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. }
One other historical source seems to have made this same assessment of the “XV” symbol. Greenwich’s old Royal Naval Museum once held the boat stem in their collection, before the National Maritime Museum existed. In their 1913 Catalogue of the Exhibits, the stem is described as having come from “a 26-ft boat.” Thus, they seem to have lost the 28 foot history, but were interpreting the surviving Roman numerals as 26 — the same reading that I have proposed in this article. As well, in the Royal Naval Museum’s handwritten draft for this same 1913 catalogue (now NMM 22/3), an initial description of “24 ft” is crossed out, with “26” then written in to correct it. The current description by the National Maritime Museum in 2025 has reversed this assessment, asserting on their website today that the stem “is marked XXIV [24 foot]”. They then apply the Latin “[sic]” to the old Royal Naval Museum’s assessment of 26 feet — to denote an error. It seems that the old RNM was closer to the mark. They only lacked the historical context that part of the inscription had been lost.
[The NMM today preserves an old RNM label showing the 26 foot reading (seen above), artifact AAA2282.1 (link).]
Appendix 2: The Evans facsimile.
In his 1991 book, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery, Dave Woodman raised the question of how McClintock could be certain that the boat stem repatriated by Schwatka was the one that McClintock had seen twenty years earlier — given that McClintock was not then residing in England.
McClintock himself was certain that his boat had been found. In the fifth edition of his book (1881), published shortly after the return of Schwatka and Gilder, he states that “the prow (or stem) of this boat is now in England ... The letters and numbers deeply cut into the stem are identical with my description ... and therefore prove her to be the same boat.” This too is curious. McClintock must have derived this information through correspondence with someone in England rather than by personal observation, for between 1879 and 1883 Admiral McClintock was living in Bermuda, where he was serving as the Commander in Chief of the North America and West Indies station.”[Woodman 1991.]
A rubbing of the inscription, sent by mail, would be an elegant solution to this issue, allowing McClintock to “see” the original inscription again, and even explaining McClintock’s renewed reference to letters and numbers “deeply cut into the stem.”
Alison Freebairn found a cover letter confirming this, in the same collection of McClintock’s papers at Greenwich that contained the facsimile (MCL/45/1). The “someone in England” postulated by Woodman has signed the letter “Fred Jno Evans”, and Freebairn believes this to be Sir Frederick John Evans, then Hydrographer of the Navy.
“Lieut. Schwatka’s Arctic relics have reached the Admiralty... The Boats stem is among them, and I enclose a copy of the marking thereon – from a rubbing – which you will see is identical with your sketch and description.”[Letter from Evans to McClintock, 18 May 1881. MCL/45/1.]
It is interesting that Evans states he is enclosing not the rubbing, but a copy made from the rubbing. The note in red ink on the facsimile found by Freebairn in this same collection is dated to the same month as Evans’ letter (May 1881), and is noticeably written by the same hand. Therefore, Evans’ letter likely explains the creation of both the rubbing and certainly the facsimile, as well as the solution to Woodman’s Bermuda puzzle from 1991.
[Whether this letter ultimately reached McClintock in Bermuda or Halifax, or elsewhere, we have not investigated.]
Appendix 3: Miscellaneous additional notes.
It is possible that “Apr” on the boat stem was originally fully written out, as “April”, prior to the stem’s weight reduction. Writing those additional letters “il” would take about as much space as the Roman numerals “II” that are here presumed to be missing from the first line.
Why does the boat stem sketch in Voyage of the Fox depict the last letter of “Apr” in superscript, with two dots beneath? This is obviously physically inaccurate, as seen by consulting the stem itself or the rubbing. However, the same superscript also appears in McClintock’s sledging journal, as well as the sketch on the back of the rubbing (though these instances omit the two dots). My assumption is that all three of these superscripts are merely the old convention of signalling an abbreviated word (in this case “April”) by ending the abbreviation with superscript letters.
Where does this proper name “Boat Place” come from, given that the Inuit did not find this site until after McClintock? I looked into this question in Appendix 6 of my 2021 article, “Reversing the Chronometers at the Boat Place.” The answer seems to be a coincidental agreement between the Inuktitut and German languages during the Schwatka Expedition in discussing other boat places (e.g. Starvation Cove), the German term then being applied to the McClintock site as “Bootplatz” by the German-speaking expedition artist Klutschak, and from there mass broadcast to the world (and historians) when a Klutschak sketch was reproduced in The Illustrated London News captioned as: “Boat Place, Erebus Bay” (ILN, 28 May 1881, page 517). Thus does the now commonly accepted name for this site appear nowhere in the book about its discovery (The Voyage of the Fox). “Boat Place” is thus an Inuktitut-German-English term.
“Its function for the boat was analogous to something that we in the automobile age would recognize: a license plate.” The license plate on the front of my semi truck shares four of six categories with the boat stem inscription: a place, a year, a month, and an identification number. Rather than length, there is a mark denoting weight.
Appendix 4: Two boats on Beechey Island.
[This appendix was created after publication, on 11 April 2025.]
Just three days after publishing this article, I was referencing Allen Young’s 1875 visit to Beechey Island in the Pandora, and belatedly realized that he had recorded similar inscriptions on the two 30 foot boats left in the supply depot in the 1850s.
{ From Young’s 1879 The Two Voyages of the Pandora. }
{ Courtesy of Toronto Public Library. }
The order of categories nearly matches the Erebus Bay inscription, with the exception that the 3rd line has been moved to the top slot: instead of “Con” for a contract build, it is here a broad arrow for a government build (as also seen on the Investigator boat’s stem).
With now three boat inscriptions from this era, we see a similarity of informational organization, but not a rigorous order. In each case, three categories are clustered together (Place, Length, Build), but never in the same order.
Bibliography.
Betts, Matthew.
2022. HMS Terror: The Design, Fitting, and Voyages of a Polar Discovery Ship.
Lentz, John W.
2003. The Fox Expedition in Search of Franklin: A Documentary Trail. Arctic, Vol. 56, No. 2 (June 2003) pp. 175–184 (link).
McClintock, Francis Leopold.
1859. The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas.
The 1st edition of this book was published on Christmas Eve 1859 (London Daily News, 26 December 1859, page 3, column 2). All British editions during McClintock’s lifetime were published by John Murray of London. All original outer covers were in blue cloth. The first two editions outwardly look identical (the ship Fox by W.W. May in gold on the cover), then the 3rd through 6th editions outwardly look identical (physically smaller, with Franklin’s profile by David embossed on the cover). My thanks to Douglas Wamsley for assistance in completing this list of editions. [N.B. Cyriax writes erroneously in the opening pages of his 1939 book that the 1895 edition of McClintock’s book was the “8th” edition.]1859, 1st edition.1860, 2nd edition.1869, 3rd edition.1875, 4th edition.1881, 5th edition.1895, 6th edition.1908, “Popular” (7th) edition.
RNM 1913.
Royal Naval Museum.
1913. Catalogue of the Exhibits in the Royal Naval Museum, Greenwich. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd.
Ryan, Karen.
2018. Death In The Ice: The Mystery of the Franklin Expedition.
Stenton, Douglas R.
2014. A Most Inhospitable Coast: The Report of Lieutenant William Hobson’s 1859 Search for the Franklin Expedition on King William Island. Arctic, Vol. 67, No. 4 (December 2014) pp. 511–522 (link).
Stenton & Park 2017.
Douglas R. Stenton and Robert W. Park.
2017. History, Oral History and Archaeology: Reinterpreting the “Boat Places” of Erebus Bay. Arctic, Vol. 70, No. 2 (June 2017) pp. 203–218 (link).
Stenton et al. 2021.
Douglas R. Stenton, Stephen Fratpietro, Anne Keenleyside, and Robert W. Park.
2021. DNA identification of a sailor from the 1845 Franklin northwest passage expedition. Polar Record, Volume 57, 2021, e14 (link).
Stenton et al. 2024.
Douglas R. Stenton, Stephen Fratpietro, and Robert W. Park.
2024. Identification of a senior officer from Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition. Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 59, November 2024 (link).
Walpole, Garth. Editor: Russell Potter.
2017. Relics of the Franklin Expedition: Discovering Artifacts from the Doomed Arctic Voyage of 1845.
Woodman, David C.
1991. Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony.
Zachary, Logan.
2021. Who Wrote The Victory Point Record? illuminator.blog, 1 June 2021 (link).
Zachary, Logan.
2021. Reversing the Chronometers at the Boat Place. illuminator.blog, 1 November 2021 (link).
Miscellaneous sources:
The Erebus Bay boat stem fragment is artefact AAA2282 (link) held by Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum.
The Investigator boat stem fragment is artefact 130X107C5-1 held by Parks Canada.
The inscription facsimile held by Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum is part of record MCL/45/1 in the McClintock family papers; the same record contains Evans’ 18 May 1881 letter to McClintock. McClintock’s sledging journal is MCL/19/2.
The Inuktitut (Inuit language) place name for Qikiqtaq / ᕿᑭᖅᑕᖅ (King William Island) used in this article was sourced from the Inuit Heritage Trust Place Names Program, referenced 1 April 2025 (link).
The imagery taken from The Voyage of the Fox as well as the Boat Places sketches are my own photography from physical copies in my library. The black and white Boat Place sketch is from Harper’s Weekly, dated 10 October 1859, pages 696-7. The colored Boat Place sketch is from an edition of Thirty Years In The Arctic Regions, dated 1859, published in New York by H. Dayton; not all editions of this book have this sketch.
A primitive form of this article was created in 2020 as photographic filler for the debut of illuminator.blog (link).
– L.Z. April 6, 2025.
– Updated 11 April 2025: Added Appendix 4.