We’ve previously written about how Arctic explorers relied on homing pigeons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Recently, we uncovered facts demonstrating that Royal Navy personnel brought homing pigeons with them as they searched for the Lost Franklin Bay Expedition in the 1850s.  Given that homing pigeons were very much a novelty amongst the British public at the time, this represents an early usage of pigeons in a British military setting.  In this blog post, we examine Captain Sir John Ross’s 1850-51 search for the Lost Franklin Bay Expedition and how pigeons were used on this venture.

On May 19, 1845, Royal Navy officer Captain Sir John Franklin sailed out of the river village Greenhithe toward the Canadian Arctic.  Commanding the warships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, his task was to explore the uncharted sections of the Northwest Passage, a sea lane in the Arctic Ocean linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  Although Franklin didn’t know it at the time, it would be the last time he and his crew members saw England.  Following a July 1845 sighting by a whaling ship, the Franklin Expedition vanished into the mists of time.  

By the fall of 1846, Captain Sir John Ross, a Scottish Royal Navy officer, sensed that something bad had happened to his old friend.  A seasoned polar explorer, Ross possessed considerable experience in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, an area that encompasses the modern-day provinces of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.  In 1818, he sailed through this region on the first Admiralty-sponsored search for the Northwest Passage. Ross ultimately failed to uncover any useful information during that trip, but he redeemed himself on a return voyage in 1829, where he recorded valuable geographical and ethnological information, for which he received a knighthood from King William IV.  

Drawing on his deep knowledge of the Arctic, Ross knew that Franklin should’ve returned at  this point.  He felt honor bound to do something—indeed, Ross had promised Franklin that he’d personally lead a relief party if Franklin failed to return within two years. With 1847 just a few months away, Ross contacted the Admiralty with an offer to lead a search-and-rescue mission the following summer.  The Admiralty denied his request, and renewed its denial when Ross raised the issue again in 1847.  But in April 1850, the Admiralty bowed to mounting public pressure and accepted Ross’s offer.  

At 73 years of age, Ross now found himself preparing for the third Arctic voyage of his career.  To assist the relief expedition, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC)—the company that essentially ran much of Canada at this time—offered a generous sum of ￡500.  With this donation, Ross wasted no time in organizing the venture.  With little time to spare, he quickly obtained two ships for the voyage: the Felix, a newly built schooner, and his personal yacht, the Mary, which would serve as a tender.  He then assembled a crew and outlined the parameters of the journey.  As planned, Ross would sail to the Lancaster Sound in Nunavut, where he’d join four other relief missions and coordinate search efforts for Franklin and his crew.

Before leaving the United Kingdom, Ross sought a way to maintain communications with the outside world.  Letters could be sent to the Admiralty and HBC officials, but mail delivery was slow and not guaranteed. Outside of traditional mail service, an explorer was limited to sending written messages either via balloon or in bottles tossed into ocean currents.  As a last-ditch effort, a message could be deposited in a cairn on some island for future explorers to find.  If any of these methods failed, it could be months or even years before the British public learned of Ross’s (and ultimately Franklin’s) whereabouts.  

Ross rose to the occasion and hatched a novel plan: he would attempt to deliver messages through carrier pigeons while searching for Franklin.  To that end, he procured four homing pigeons—both an older and a younger pair—from a Ms. Dunlop, a fellow Scot living at Annan Hill, near Ayr. Ms. Dunlop’s pigeons had considerable experience in message delivery; she had trained them  “to keep up a correspondence to two friends at a distance.” Ms. Dunlop evidently was an early practitioner of pigeon racing, as the sport was largely unknown amongst the British public at this time.  Commercial firms, press agencies, and government institutions in the UK had relied on pigeons for message delivery since the late-18th century.  With the invention of the electrical telegraph, however, these institutions quickly sold off their pigeon stocks to individual fanciers, leading to the growth of a nascent pigeon racing culture, especially amongst the professional classes.  In its infancy in the 1850s, pigeon racing would soon flourish with the first homing pigeon clubs popping up by the 1870s.

On May 23rd, 1850, Ross and his vessels departed from Loch Ryan.  With his pigeons in tow, Ross devised a plan for their use on his expedition: two pigeons would be freed when he made his winter quarters and two more would be released if and when he found Franklin. The relief mission reached the Lancaster Sound in August, where they connected with the other relief ships.  For weeks, a total of ten ships scoured the barren landscape for signs of Franklin’s expedition.  Ross apparently told his fellow rescuers about his plans to send messages via pigeon—they reacted with considerable amusement.  “[M]any people laughed at the idea of a bird doing any service in such a cause,” Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, an officer aboard the relief ship HMS Pioneer, remarked in a post-expedition account. “I plead guilty, myself, to having joined in the laugh at the poor creatures, when, with feathers in a half-moulted state, I heard it proposed to despatch them.”  Ross’s correspondence, however, reveals that he held the pigeons in high regard.  “[W]hat I place the most faith in [are] four well-trained carrier pigeons,” he wrote in an August 13th letter sent to an HBC official.  “I hope they will be the bearers of good news.”  One can’t help but wonder why Ross believed in the pigeons so strongly; did he have personal experience with Britain’s burgeoning racing pigeon community?

By mid-September, the region’s waters had started freezing over, as the Arctic winter set in.  Ross’s vessels and the other rescue ships settled in at Assistance Bay, located on the southern shore of Cornwallis Island.  The Bay provided natural protection against the fierce northern winds, so the rescuers thought it appropriate to make their winter quarters at the site. In early October, Ross decided to release his pigeons. Per his contemporary diary, eleven messages from various officers were scribbled onto tiny pieces of paper and fastened to the pigeons.  Modern pigeon fanciers may think it absurd that Ross expected the birds to fly all the way back to Scotland, but Ross, to his credit, seems to have known better.  Indeed, per contemporary accounts, Ross intended for the pigeons to alight upon “some of the whaling vessels about the mouth of Hudson’s Straits” and “they would take a passage to England.” 

Yet, initial attempts to release Ms. Dunlop’s pigeons failed miserably; the birds merely fluttered about the “boundless expanse of unbroken snow and ice” for a while, then returned to the Felix.  Subsequent releases yielded the same exact outcome.  Crew members tried firing guns at the birds to frighten them away, but the pigeons still refused to fly away from the ship.  Having been confined for months aboard the ship, it appears the pigeons now viewed the Felix as their home loft.  

Not willing to admit defeat, Ross and his crew rigged up a contraption that would’ve delighted Rube Goldberg.  As they envisioned it, an 8 x 6 hydrogen balloon with an attached basket would carry the pigeons off the ship and over the Arctic landscape.  After floating for 24 hours, a cord of slow match–a slow-burning cord used in black-powder weapons–connecting the basket to the balloon would burn up completely, causing the basket to spring open like a trapdoor, liberating the pigeons into the wild blue yonder.  To keep the birds well fed, “a little split peas” would be placed in the basket for the birds to feast upon “before leaving their temporary abode on their aerial passage.”

Eyewitness accounts are muddled as to the specifics of the balloon launch. Dr. Peter Sutherland, a surgeon attached to the relief ships HMS Lady Franklin and HMS Sophia, reported that Ross “sent off two balloons, with a carrier pigeon attached to each in a small basket.”  Lt. Osborn’s memoir, in contrast, only mentions “two birds duly freighted with intelligence and notes from the married men” secured to a single balloon.  Meanwhile, an account appearing in the Ayr Observer exactly one year later claimed that Ross attached the younger pair of pigeons to a balloon, then did the same for the older pigeons. The newspaper’s account mirrors the Felix’s logbook, which records two separate pigeon releases occurring on the evenings of October 3rd and 4th, respectively.

What happened after the balloons floated away remains unclear as well.  Per Ross’s personal diary, the pigeons “went rapidly out of sight S.S.E. true.”  Yet the author of the Lady Franklin’s logbook recorded an entirely different result: “At 4”20 minits [sic] it fell in the water and drowned the pigeons [sic] about 3 miles distance from the ships.”  This discrepancy perhaps can be reconciled by considering a post-expedition account appearing in the Ayr Observer.   According to this version of events, the younger pigeons’ balloon “rose beautifully, and [was] seen careening along southward, till lost first to the eye and then to the telescope.”  In contrast, “the older pair . . . were unfortunately drowned . . . when about two miles away” the balloon faltered and “trailed along the ice,” dipping periodically into “the snow and water.”  Crew members chased after the balloon and tried to salvage the precious cargo, but “the birds could not be saved.”

Adding to the mystery, on October 22nd, the Glasgow Daily Mail claimed that Ross’s pigeons had been spotted on October 18th, attempting to visit Ms. Dunlop’s dovecote.  This account alleged that two birds had “arrived within a short time of each other” and that neither of them had carried a despatch.  The account alleged that one of the pigeons “was found to be considerably mutilated,” evidence apparently of an attached message having “been shot away.” 

Within a week, the press had added various details to the initial story.   Per this rapidly evolving narrative, a homing pigeon had been seen perched atop of Ms. Dunlop’s dovecote on October 13th.  However, because the loft was undergoing repairs and had been sealed off, the pigeon (and possibly its mate) had flown away.  On the 16th, Ms. Dunlop received information that “a strange carrier-pigeon had taken refuge at Shewalton, the seat of the Lord Justice General.”  The pigeon was brought to Ms. Dunlop, “who at once recognised it as one of the young pair.”  Upon being taken to its old loft, the pigeon purportedly “flew at once into the nest where it had been hatched,” even though there were upwards of forty similar compartments in the building.  The newspapers claimed that the “feathers under the wing were very much ruffled, where it is customary to attach despatches,” but observed that “the note, if any were attached, has been lost.”  If these accounts were to be trusted, then one or two of Ross’s pigeons had flown over 2000 miles from Cornwallis Island to Ayr.

Not everybody was convinced by these reports.  On October 30th, a Stretford fancier named John Galloway expressed his skepticism in a letter to the Manchester Guardian. A stockbroker by profession, Galloway had been a pioneer of pigeon racing in the UK; as early as 1840, he had been training his loft to fly from London to Manchester in four hours.  His birds, per an account written fifty years later, “were reckoned to be the best in England at that time and that they were bred from Antwerp birds imported by the stockbroker.”  With his considerable expertise in the affairs of pigeon racing, Galloway could not stomach the inaccurate reporting surfacing in papers throughout the UK.

Writing off the newspaper accounts as “the clumsy invention of some wag,” Galloway proceeded to poke holes in the emerging tale.  He observed that pigeons would not fly away from their home loft as Ross’s birds had allegedly done—”they would remain at their old habitation until nearly famished with hunger.”  He then argued that the damaged feathers under the bird’s wing were irrelevant, as fanciers typically secured messages to the pigeon’s leg and “would just as soon think of tying a letter to a bird’s tail as under its wing.”  Finally, Galloway attacked the distance traveled.   “[N]o such distance as 2000 miles has been accomplished by any trained carrier pigeons,” he declared.  He pointed to a 600-mile race between Spain and Belgium in 1844, where “[t]wo hundred trained pigeons, of the best breed in the world” were released “and only 70 returned.”

A particularly stinging critique appeared from none other than Ross’ colleague and fellow Royal Navy officer, Captain Charles Codrington Forsyth.  Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, had recruited Forsyth to lead a private expedition to the Arctic Archipelago.  But after spending a mere 10 days in August hunting for Franklin, Forsyth had ordered his crew to head back to Scotland, reaching the UK by early October. Forsyth had personally seen Ross’s pigeons aboard the Felix.  The Captain was not impressed by what he’d observed.  While the press was still in a frenzy over the purported return of Ross’s bird(s), Forsyth expressed his doubts to the British literary magazine the Athenaeum. “[T]he birds are very young and not likely to stand the cold of the northern latitudes,” he reportedly told the periodical. 

In spite of Galloway and others throwing cold water on the enterprise, much of the British public nonetheless remained convinced that future messages about Franklin would soon be arriving on the wings of a pigeon.  On Nov. 2nd, residents of the Scottish city of Dundee allegedly spotted a pigeon “hovering about with a letter attached under one of the wings” near some ships along the River Tay.  “Of course, there was no other conjecture but that it must have come from the Arctic regions with intelligence of Sir John Franklin, ” the Dundee Advertiser reported, “and the eagerness to get possession of the winged stranger was very great indeed.”  The bird alighted onto a ship’s rigging, but flew away when people approached it. Later, it was reported to  great dismay that the pigeon had simply traveled from nearby St Andrews.  

Writing from the vantage point of 174 years later, it is difficult to make judgments.  Nevertheless, a pigeon flying 2000 miles over snowy terrain and oceans in just under two weeks strains credulity.  While modern-day, elite racing homers can fly 500 to 600 miles a day, in the mid-19th century, the breed was still in its infancy, especially in Britain.  In 1842, for instance, pigeons liberated at Liverpool took nearly 12 hours to fly 300 miles to Brussels, Belgium.  A similar race was held between Hull and Antwerp, Belgium in 1846.  The fastest fliers made the trip of 280 to 300 miles in seven hours, while the remainder took upwards of a day.  Notably, none of these racing pigeons were British natives, as evidenced by their homing to lofts in Belgium.  At best, we can say that Ross released a pair of pigeons via balloon over the Arctic Archipelago in October 1850; everything afterwards must remain a matter of speculation. 

Ross ultimately returned to the UK in late-September 1851 without any insight into Franklin’s fate.  Despite media reports, his efforts to communicate by pigeons likely failed.  Instead of tying his pigeons to balloons and hoping they’d land on a passing whaling ship,  Ross would’ve been better served depositing the birds at an accessible HBC trading post and instructing the facility’s personnel in the finer points of flight training.  If Ross had done this, the pigeons may have regarded the outpost as their home loft, setting them up to be distributed to the relief vessels.  The ships, in turn, would’ve been able to remain in contact with the outpost as they searched for Franklin.  Ross’s failure to attempt such a feat reveals the overall ignorance of homing pigeons’ flight abilities during this period. Still, the possibility that pigeons had returned from the Canadian Arctic excited a British public desperate for information about Franklin, especially Lady Franklin.  In our next blog post, we’ll take a look at two more relief expeditions occurring in 1851 and 1852; inspired by Ross’s example, the individuals in charge of these missions brought pigeons with them for use in the Arctic.

Sources:

• “A Pigeon Race,” Manchester Weekly Times & Examiner, Jul. 25, 1846 at 3.
• “Arctic Searching Expedition,” The North British Review, Vol. X, No. 1, May 1851, at 255.
• “Carrier Pigeon,” The Glasgow Daily Mail, Nov. 6, 1850, at 4.
• “Carrier Pigeons,” The Zoologist, at 3709-10, Vol. 10, 1852 (citing Lieut. Sherard Osborn’s “Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal, at 174).
• “Despatch No. 2,” The Times, Oct. 1, 1850, at 8.
• Galloway, John, “The Reported Return of Sir John Ross’s Carrier Pigeon to Ayr,” The Guardian, Oct. 30, 1850 at 8.
• Johnes, Martin, “Pigeon Racing and Working-Class Culture in Britain, c. 1870-1950,” Cultural and Social History 4(3):361-383, September 2007.
• “Latest from Sir John Ross,” The Glasgow Daily Mail, Oct. 22, 1850, at 2.
•  Old Hand, “The Racing Pigeons and Pigeon Racing for All – Vol. I” (1966).
• “Our Weekly Gossip,” The Athenaeum, No. 1201, Nov. 2, 1850.
• “Pigeon Race,” Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, Aug. 6, 1842, at 7.
• Ross, W. Gillies, Hunters on the Track: William Penny and the Search for Franklin (2019).
• “Sir John Ross and the Carrier Pigeons,” The Glasgow Herald, Oct. 3, 1851, at 6.
• “Sir John Ross’s Carrier-Pigeons,” The Leicestershire Mercury and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties, Oct. 25, 1851, at 4.
• “Sir John Ross’s Carrier Pigeons,” The Standard, Oct. 29, 1850, at 1.
• Sutherland, Peter, Journal of a Voyage in Baffin’s Bay and Barrow Straits, in the Years 1850-1851, Vol. 1, at 403 (1852).
• “The Carrier Pigeons of Sir John Ross,” The Observer, Oct. 28, 1850, at 7.