He was a captain in the Royal Navy and a British Arctic explorer. The mystery of his disappearance in the Canadian Arctic, with his crew, was resolved more than a century later. The intention of their expedition was to find the Northwest Passage, which had haunted Franklin. It started in May 1845 with 128 men and two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and they were last seen in July 1845 at west of Baffin Bay by the whaler Enterprise.
Lady Franklin financed several rescue expeditions and many lives were lost without producing any results. Among these expeditions one could find ten British boats and two Americans, who possibly had as main objective to reach the North Pole, more than finding Franklin; by that time, he was clearly perished.
Lady Franklin wrote the elegy “Lord Franklin,” in memory of her husband. Its ballads told their fate and became very popular.
Almost ten years after his disappearance, explorer John Rae discovered by chance, while exploring the Boothia Peninsula, an Inuit who told him about a group of 35 to 40 white men who had been killed near the mouth of the Back River. The eskimo showed several objects that could be identified as belongings of Franklin and his men.
In 1859, McClintock found a document dated April 25th, 1848, signed by James Fitzjames and Francis Crozier, captains of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror respectively, giving the news of the tragedy. Among other events, the death of Franklin was dated to June 11th, 1847 and some documents provided information on the boats, that had been stranded on ice since 12th of September in 1846. The survivors had left them to go to the south and try to reach the Back River.
The investigation concluded that the cause of death was a combination of bad weather, canned food poisoning, poor planning, and poor health. It was not until September 2014, during an expedition conducted by researchers from Parks Canada, in a remote controlled underwater vehicle that one of the ships, HMS Erebus, was found near King William Island in the territory of Nunavut. Two years later, in the same area, in 2016, finally he found the HMS Terror.