Jane Griffin

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Portrait of Lady Jane Franklin

Jane Griffin, Lady Franklin (4 December 1791 – 18 July 1875) was an early Tasmanian pioneer, traveller and second wife of the explorer John Franklin.

Jane was the second daughter of John Griffin, a liveryman and later a governor of the Goldsmith's Company, and his wife Jane Guillemard. There was Huguenot blood on both sides of her family. She was born in London, was well educated, and her father being well-to-do had her education completed by much travel on the continent. Her portrait painted when she was 24 by Amelie Romilly at Geneva shows her to have been a pretty girl with charm and vivacity.

Marriage to John Franklin

As a young woman, Jane had been strongly attracted to a London physician and scientist, Dr. Peter Mark Roget. She once said he was the only man who made her swoon. But nothing ever came of their relationship. Jane had been a friend of John Franklin's first wife, Eleanor Anne Porden, who died early in 1825. In 1828, Griffin became engaged to him. They were married on 5 November 1828 and in 1829 he was knighted. During the next three years, she was parted for lengthy periods from her husband who was on service in the Mediterranean. In 1836, he was appointed lieutenant-governor of Tasmania where they arrived on 6 January 1837 on board the immigrant ship Fairlie.

Relationship with the colonies of Australia

Lady Franklin at once began to take an interest in the colony and did a good deal of exploring along the southern and western coast. In 1839, Lady Franklin became the first European woman to travel overland between Port Phillip and Sydney. In April that year, she visited the new settlement at Melbourne, where she received an address signed by 63 of the leading citizens which referred to her "character for kindness, benevolence and charity". With her husband, she encouraged the founding of secondary schools for both boys and girls. In 1841, she visited South Australia and persuaded the governor, Colonel George Gawler, to set aside some ground overlooking Spencer Gulf for a monument to Matthew Flinders. This was set up later in the year. In 1841-42, she was the first European woman to travel overland from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour.

She had much correspondence with Elizabeth Fry about the female convicts, and did what she could to ameliorate their lot. She was accused of using undue influence with her husband in his official acts but there is no evidence of this. No doubt he was glad to have her help in solving his problems, and probably they collaborated in the founding of the scientific society which afterwards developed into the Royal Society of Tasmania. When Franklin was recalled at the end of 1843, they went first to Melbourne by the schooner Flying Fish and then to England by way of New Zealand on board the barque Rajah.

Their popularity was such in the Australian colonies that when it was learned that Lady Franklin was organising an expedition using the auxiliary steamship Isabel in 1852, subscriptions were taken up and those in Van Diemens Land alone totalled £1671 13/4.^[1]

Following the disappearance of her husband

Her husband started on his last voyage in May 1845, and when it was realized that he must have come to disaster, Lady Franklin devoted herself for many years to trying to ascertain his fate.

Lady Franklin sponsored seven expeditions to find her husband or his records (two of which failed to reach the Arctic):

• 1850 Prince Albert under Charles Codrington Forsyth and William Parker Snow,
• 1851 Prince Albert under William Kennedy and Joseph Rene Bellot,
• 1852 Isabel (one under Donald Beatson aborted, the other under Edward Inglefield explored Greenland),
• 1853 Isabel (William Kennedy and Robert Grate, aborted),
• 1857 Fox under Francis Leopold McClintock, and
• 1875 Pandora under Allen Young.

By means of sponsorship, use of influence and by offering sizeable rewards for information about him, she instigated or supported many other searches. Her efforts made the expedition's fate one of the most vexed questions of the decade. Ultimately evidence was found by Francis McClintock in 1859 that Sir John had died twelve years previously in 1847. Prior accounts had suggested that, in the end, the expedition had turned to cannibalism to survive, but Lady Franklin refused to believe these stories and poured scorn on explorer John Rae, who had in fact been the first person to return with definite news of her husband's fate.

Although McClintock had found conclusive evidence that Sir John Franklin and his fellow expeditioners were dead, Lady Franklin remained convinced that their written records may remain buried in a cache in the Arctic. She shared this opinion with fellow expedition sponsor Henry Grinnell of New York, and the two corresponded regularly. She provided moral and some financial support for some later expeditions that planned to seek the records, including those of William Parker Snow ^[2] and Charles Francis Hall ^[3] in the 1860s. Finally, in 1874 she joined forces with Allen Young to purchase and fit out the former steam gunboat HMS Pandora to undertake another expedition to the region around Prince of Wales Island. The expedition left London in June 1875, but Lady Franklin herself died in London on July 18, 1875. At her funeral on July 29, the pall-bearers included Captains McClintock, Collinson and Ommanney, R.N., while many other “Old Arctics” engaged in the Franklin searches were also in attendance. The Pandora expedition returned in December, unsuccessful, as ice prevented her from passing west of the Franklin Channel.

Lady Franklin was a woman of unusual character and personality. One of the earliest women in Tasmania who had had the full benefit of education and cultural surroundings, she was both an example and a force, and set a new standard in ways of living to the more prosperous settlers who were now past the stage of merely struggling for a living. Her determined efforts, in connection with which she spent a great deal of her own money to discover the fate of her husband, incidentally added much to the world's knowledge of the arctic regions.

From soon after her husband sailed on his final voyage until shortly before her own death, Lady Franklin herself travelled extensively around the world, generally accompanied by her husband's niece Sophia Cracroft, who remained her secretary and companion until her death. Most of Lady Franklin's surviving papers are held by the Scott Polar Research Institute.

The ballad Lady Franklin's Lament commemorated Lady Franklin's search for her lost husband. It was said: 'What the nation would not do, a woman did'.

The Lady Franklin Museum is a classical temple built by Lady Franklin in 1842, and named Ancanthe, 'blooming valley'. Wife of Lt-Governor Franklin, Lady Franklin was shocked at Tasmani's lack of cultural institutions, and colonists' indifference. She built the temple as a museum, and left 400 acres in trust to ensure the continuance of what she hoped would become the focus of the colony's cultural aspirations. A century of apathy and forsaken duty by the administrators of the Anglican Church and the city of Hobart followed, with the museum used as an apple shed among other functions; but in 1949 it was made the home of the Art Society of Tasmania, who rescued the building. In its arcadian setting at Lenah Valley, it sits like a 'tiny Temple of Athene ' – at once ineffable and enchanting.^[4]

Awards and honors

• Founder's Gold Medal, the Royal Geographical Society^[5]

See also

• Lady Franklin's Revenge, a history of explorations of the Arctic funded by Lady Franklin
• Lady Franklin Bay, a bay on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada
• Lady Franklin Rock, an island in the Fraser River near Yale, British Columbia named at the end of her visit there during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush
• Lady Franklin Rock, a rock near Vernal Fall in Yosemite National Park in California, United States

References

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Frances J. Woodward, 'Franklin, Jane (1791 - 1875)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp 411-412.
• Roderic Owen, The Fate of Franklin: The Life and Mysterious Death of the Most Heroic of Arctic Explorers, Hutchinson Group (Australia) Pty. Ltd., Richmond South, Victoria, 1978.
• Ken McGoogan. Lady Franklin's Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History. Toronto, HarperCollins. 2005
• Journals, correspondence and papers of Jane, Lady Franklin at the Scott Polar Research Institute.
• Portrait of Lady Franklin, 1816 by Amelie Romilly.
• Lady Jane Franklin from a sketch by T. Bock, Hobart Town, about 1840.
• The text of Lady Franklin's Lament.
• Franklin, Tasmania was founded by, and named after, her.
• Lady Franklin's Revenge, by Ken McGoogan
• as affecting the fate of my absent husband, edited by Erika Behrisch Elce

External links

• Archival material relating to Jane Griffin (Lady Franklin) listed at the UK National Register of Archives

• Serle, Percival (1949). "Franklin, Jane". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. http://gutenberg.net.au/dictbiog/0-dict-biogF.html#franklin1. 
• Bits of Travel at Home, Helen Hunt Jackson, 1878
• Lady Jane Franklin National Library of Australia, Newspaper Digitisation Project.