"It Came From Too-loo-ar’s Ship": A Relic From Sir John Franklin’s HMS Erebus

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

On May 9, 1869, Charles Francis Hall, an American explorer tracking the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845, examined a strip of sheet copper with telltale Broad Arrow markings. He was in an iglu on the sea ice off King William Island (in present day Nunavut, Canada), near to where Franklin’s search for a Northwest Passage with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror had unraveled some twenty years earlier. His Inuit hosts, from whom he had just obtained the relic, stated that it came from a ship belonging to Too-loo-ar – their name for Franklin. The relic made its way to the National Maritime Museum in England yet remained unidentified. Recently Parks Canada recognized it as part of a Harris’s Patent Lightning Conductor from Erebus This artifact, an archaeological junction box of sorts, speaks to Victorian technological advancement, Royal Navy polar voyages, and contemporary Inuit harvesting of Erebus’ material culture bounty.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow