Sir John Franklin was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. After serving in wars against Napoleonic France and the United States, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic, in 1819 and 1825, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1839 to 1843. During his third and final expedition to force the Northwest Passage in 1845, Franklin's ships became icebound off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, where he died in June 1847. The icebound ships were abandoned ten months later and the entire crew died, from causes such as starvation, hypothermia, and scurvy.
Admiral Sir Edward Belcher was a British naval officer, hydrographer, and explorer. Born in Nova Scotia, he was the great-grandson of Governor Jonathan Belcher. He was briefly married to Diana Jolliffe, stepdaughter of Captain Peter Heywood, that marriage ending upon her application for legal separation for his having infected her with venereal disease.
Frederick William Beechey was an English naval officer, artist, explorer, hydrographer and writer.
Hotham Inlet, also known as Kobuk Lake, is an arm of Kotzebue Sound on the northwestern coast of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is 50 miles (80 km) long and 5–20 miles (8–32 km) wide. The inlet is the outlet of the Kobuk and Selawik Rivers and it is bounded on the southwest by the Baldwin Peninsula.
Point Barrow or Nuvuk is a headland on the Arctic coast in the U.S. state of Alaska, 9 miles (14 km) northeast of Utqiagvik. It is the northernmost point of all the territory of the United States, at 71°23′20″N156°28′45″W. The distance from there to the North Pole is 1,122 nautical miles. Murchison Promontory, the northernmost mainland point of Canada and of the Americas, is 40 miles (64 km) farther north. Point Barrow is an important geographical landmark, marking the limit between two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea to the west and the Beaufort Sea to the east.
Sir William Beechey was a leading English portraitist during the golden age of British painting.
David Buchan was a Scottish naval officer and Arctic explorer.
Beechey Island is an island located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago of Nunavut, Canada, in Wellington Channel. It is separated from the southwest corner of Devon Island by Barrow Strait. Other features include Wellington Channel, Erebus Harbour, and Terror Bay.
Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was an Irish officer of the Royal Navy and polar explorer who participated in six expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic. In May 1845, he was second-in-command to Sir John Franklin and captain of HMS Terror during the Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, which ended with the deaths of all 129 crewmen.
Frances Anne Hopkins was a British painter. She was the third of Frederick William Beechey's five children. In 1858, she married a Hudson's Bay Company official, Edward Hopkins, whose work took him to North America. Hopkins travelled alongside with him. While sailing, she was able to sketch extensively, therefore, capturing a now lost way of living – the last days of the fur trade.
Beechey is a surname. Notable people with the name include:
Richard Brydges Beechey was an Anglo-Irish painter and admiral in the Royal Navy.
Frederick Whymper was a British artist and explorer.
Point Franklin is a piece of land located on the Chukchi Sea side of North Slope, Alaska.
Franklin's lost expedition was a British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin that departed from England in 1845 aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and was assigned to traverse the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. The expedition met with disaster after both ships and their crews, a total of 129 officers and men, became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island, in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut. After being icebound for more than a year, Erebus and Terror were abandoned in April 1848, by which point Franklin and nearly two dozen others had died. The survivors, now led by Franklin's deputy Francis Crozier and Erebus' captain James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland and disappeared.
The Seahorse Islands is a chain of long and narrow sandy islands in western North Slope Borough, Alaska, United States. They are located between Peard Bay and the Chukchi Sea, 1.7 km (1.1 mi) east of Point Franklin. The longest island is about 5 km (3.1 mi) in length and the highest point of the islands is 2 m (6.6 ft). The shape of these coastal islands has changed over the years.
HMS Blossom was an 18-gun Cormorant-class sloop-of-war. She was built in 1806 and is best known for the 1825–1828 expedition under Captain Beechey to the Pacific Ocean. She explored as far north as Point Barrow, Alaska, the furthest point into the Arctic any non-Inuit had been at the time. She was finally broken up in 1848.
This timeline of European exploration lists major geographic discoveries and other firsts credited to or involving Europeans during the Age of Discovery and the following centuries, between the years AD 1418 and 1957.
Vice-Admiral William John Samuel Pullen was a Royal Navy officer who was the first European to sail along the north coast of Alaska from the Bering Strait to the Mackenzie River in Canada. His 1849 journey was one of the many unsuccessful expeditions to rescue Sir John Franklin and explore the Northwest Passage.
The Mackenzie River expedition of 1825–1827 was the second of three Arctic expeditions led by explorer John Franklin and organized by the Royal Navy. It had as its goal the exploration of the North American coast between the mouths of the Mackenzie and Coppermine rivers and the Bering Strait, in what is now present-day Alaska, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. Franklin was accompanied by George Back and John Richardson, both of whom he had previously collaborated with during the disastrous Coppermine expedition of 1819–1821. Unlike Franklin's previous expedition, this one was largely successful, and resulted in the mapping of more than 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) of new coastline between the Kent Peninsula and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, an area that until then had remained largely unexplored by Europeans.
