The large display case in Centre Block 307-S, the Canadian prime minister’s office, is reserved for objects dear to the nation’s history and culture. The current leader, Stephen Harper, personally chose a handful of relics to display during his term in office. They are related to one of the darkest chapters in 19th-century exploration: the Franklin expedition, a British naval voyage to find the Northwest Passage. In the case lies a battered food tin with traces of red paint and lead solder oozing from its rim. A tattered label from a can of ox-cheek soup instructs diners to open it with a hatchet. A fragment of wood planking may have come from one of the expedition’s two lost ships.
Sir John Franklin was taken aboard the Erebus before it departed the Thames in May, 1845.
The Erebus’ equipment included a daguerreotype camera. This photograph of Sir John Franklin was taken aboard the Erebus before it departed England in May 1845.
It seems like an odd collection of stuff until you understand the enduring mystery of the Franklin expedition—and its unexpected significance for Canadian geopolitics in the 21st century.
For hundreds of years, the British Admiralty had been dispatching expeditions to search for a geographic chimera, the Northwest Passage linking Europe and the Pacific by a navigable route over the top of North America. Some voyages were more successful than others, but none was able to push through hundreds of square miles of pack ice from Baffin Bay to the Bering Strait. Despite having almost nothing to show for the expeditions except nautical charts revealing where the Northwest Passage was not, the Admiralty kept the dream alive. Claiming the Northwest Passage became a matter of national pride for Victorian England.
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