1786-1847

English Explorer and Naval Officer

Famed arctic explorer John Franklin was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. Following elementary and grammar school education, he went to sea over his father's objections. When he was 14, Franklin's father, a cloth merchant, was persuaded to help his son secure a place in the Royal Navy as a volunteer on HMS Polyphemus, and the lad saw action during the Battle of Copenhagen (1801). This was the first of a series of naval assignments that took him to Australia, China, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean during the next 15 years. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, during which he had been wounded and mentioned in dispatches, he was discharged in the standard manner as a lieutenant on half pay. He was not yet thirty.

What saved his career was the decision by the Royal Navy in 1818 to resume Arctic exploration...