Sir John Franklin's Erebus and Terror Expedition by Gillian Hutchinson

Author:Gillian Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472948717
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.5 Tobacco pipes

At the time of the expedition, the usual way of smoking tobacco was in clay pipes, but they were quite fragile and if their stems broke they were simply tossed away. The fragments shown here were found at Cape Felix at the north of King William Island, where members of the Franklin expedition set up an observatory to take readings of terrestrial magnetism.

This observation work had already begun when the expedition was still on the coast of Greenland, as Commander Fitzjames reported in a letter written home from HMS Erebus in June 1845. He and Lieutenant Fairholme had been taking magnetic readings in a little square wooden house, while being bitten by large mosquitoes. Despite the insects, Fitzjames gave a very cheerful assessment of the voyage so far and of his shipmates. He said that Dr Harry Goodsir, the expedition’s naturalist and acting assistant surgeon, ‘is enthusiastic about all ‘ologies … catches phenomena in a bucket, looks at the thermometer and every other meter’. The officers helped him fish up strange animals in nets and dredges, catching a quantity of cod in the process.

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