Point Franklin is a piece of land located on the Chukchi Sea side of North Slope, Alaska.
Point Franklin is a few miles north of Wainwright, limiting with the Peard Bay to the east.
Point Franklin was named by British mariner Frederick William Beechey on August 15, 1826, after Lieutenant (afterwards Sir) John Franklin. It is a strange coincidence that he named this cape just two days after Sir John Franklin had named his "farthest point" after Captain Beechey. [1] [2]
Sea otters are a common sight in the waters near Point Franklin. Whales can also be sighted offshore in the point area.
On 26 March 1898, after a 1,500-mile trek in the middle of an Arctic winter, Lt. David Henry Jarvis of the Revenue Cutter Service reaches Point Franklin to begin the rescue of 273 iced-in whalers stranded here and at Point Barrow. He finds the marooned whalers of the Belvedere near the Sea Horse Islands. [3]
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 and through the islands of the Arctic Archipelago, in 1819 and 1825, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1839 to 1843. During his third and final expedition, an attempt to traverse 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.
HMS Resolute was a mid-19th-century barque-rigged ship of the British Royal Navy, specially outfitted for Arctic exploration. Resolute became trapped in the ice and was abandoned in 1854. Recovered by an American whaler, she was returned to Queen Victoria in 1856. Timbers from the ship were later used to construct the Resolute desk which was presented to the President of the United States and is currently located in the White House Oval Office.
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.
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 Utqiaġvik. It is the northernmost point of all the territory of the United States, at 71°23′20″N156°28′45″W, 1,122 nautical miles south of the North Pole. 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.
David Buchan was a Scottish naval officer and Arctic explorer.
Peard Bay is a bay in the Chukchi Sea, in Alaska's North Slope. It is located at 70°50′43″N158°48′39″W. This bay lies just a few miles northeast of Wainwright. It was named by Frederick William Beechey in 1826, after one of his officers.
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 and to record magnetic data to help determine whether a better understanding could aid navigation. 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 second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus' captain, James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland and disappeared.
Sledge Island, or Ayak Island, is a small island in the Bering Sea. It is located 5.3 mi (8.5 km) from the southwestern shore of the Seward Peninsula, off the shores of Alaska.
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.
Cape Thompson is a headland on the Chukchi Sea coast of Alaska. It is located 26 miles (42 km) to the southeast of Point Hope, Arctic Slope. It is part of the Chukchi Sea unit of Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.
Point Hope is a headland in the U.S. state of Alaska, located at the western tip of the Lisburne Peninsula. It lies on the Chukchi Sea coast, 40 miles southwest of Cape Lisburne, Arctic Slope at 68°20′27″N166°50′00″W. The city of Point Hope is located on the foreland.
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.
The First Grinnell expedition of 1850 was the first American effort, financed by Henry Grinnell, to determine the fate of the lost Franklin Northwest Passage expedition. Led by Lieutenant Edwin De Haven, the team explored the accessible areas along Franklin's proposed route. In coordination with British expeditions, they identified the remains of Franklin's Beechey Island winter camp, providing the first solid clues to Franklin's activities during the winter of 1845, before becoming icebound themselves.
The McClure Arctic expedition of 1850, among numerous British search efforts to determine the fate of the Franklin's lost expedition, is distinguished as the voyage during which the Irish explorer Robert McClure became the first person to confirm and transit the Northwest Passage by a combination of sea travel and sledging.
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.
Thomas Abernethy was a Scottish seafarer, gunner in the Royal Navy, and polar explorer. Because he was neither an officer nor a gentleman, he was little mentioned in the books written by the leaders of the expeditions he went on, but was praised in what was written. In 1857, he was awarded the Arctic Medal for his service as an able seaman on the 1824–25 voyage of HMS Hecla, the first of his five expeditions for which participants were eligible for the award. He was in parties that, for their time, reached the furthest north, the furthest south (twice), and the nearest to the South Magnetic Pole. In 1831, along with James Clark Ross's team of six, Abernethy was in the first party ever to reach the North Magnetic Pole.
Graham Gore was an English officer of the Royal Navy and polar explorer who participated in two expeditions to the Arctic and a survey of the coastline of Australia aboard HMS Beagle. In 1845 he served under Sir John Franklin as First Lieutenant on the Erebus during the Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, which ended with the loss of all 129 officers and crewmen in mysterious circumstances.
Nuvuk, once North America’s northernmost village, was located at the tip of Point Barrow, Alaska. The Iñupiaq name means "point" or "promontory of land" and refers both to the landform and the village. Archaeological evidence indicates that Point Barrow was occupied for over 1,500 years prior to the arrival of the first Europeans. Occupation continued into the 1940s. The headland is an important archaeological site, yielding Ipiutak artifacts, many burials and artifacts associated with the Thule culture, as well as artifacts from pre- and post-contact Iupiat occupation.
Frederick Beechey 1826.
Coordinates: 70°54′28″N158°48′31″W / 70.90778°N 158.80861°W