A new watercolour by Robert Hood of the first Franklin expedition

• Published in: Polar Record
• Main Author: Williams, Hector
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2009
• Subjects: Arctic; Central Arctic; Polar Record
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0032247409990088; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0032247409990088

Perhaps the most tragic story from the Franklin expedition of 1819–1822 was the murder of Robert Hood, a talented midshipman who left a number of watercolours of the trip and of the peoples and fauna encountered (Houston 1974; Franklin 2000). The story even became the basis for a novel that won the annual Governor General of Canada's prize for fiction in 1994 for the Alberta writer, Rudy Wiebe (Wiebe 1994). The expedition undertook a desperately difficult trek that saw only nine survivors of the original twenty members, but it resulted in the first map of 800 km (500 miles) of the northern central Arctic coast of Canada.