General Chat

I am telling you that I bought the book Rollo found on Google and it was £7.99 well spent.

It may not be what I was looking for as I need some quite specialist information about the cog in relation to a small port (because I am sad and have no life).

The book is full of small, interesting articles written by members of the Nautical Research Society which I had not heard of before so sometimes a bit of random Googling does pay off.

They also have a specialist book on cogs available so I might even see if I can get that reduced somewhere.

I bought a book called Arctic Hell Ship

Was about HMS Enterprise who went looking for Sir George Franklin who was lost looking for the north west passage

My ancestor was james Wood the sailmaker on the vessel who witnessed a fight between officers

James died in c1855 from lung problems from breathing in ultra cold air

I have his death certificate and the Wife of lock keeper Was the informant

His wife has got fed up with him being away and took up with another man and had children with him

I used to go to the Nelson Birthday Lectures at Pompeylibrary and there was a man there, Ernest Coleman, who gave a lecture about the Franklin expedition and, wouldn't you know it, I disagreed with something he said, so I collared him at the tea break.

He said the only place I would find the answer was in the book on the expedition was in the book by RJ Cyriax which I would never get to see.They were printed in 1939 and stored in a warehouse that was bombed and they were all destroyed.

Ha-ha, not all. I've got one!

I think I must have picked it up at a jumble sale or something but it does have a label in it saying 'Ex-Libris HMS Something or other'.

So, did James Wood die in the Arctic or did he come home somehow?

No he came home and lodged with the lock keeper and his wife in Heybridge basin Essex

He died from lung problems caused by the extreme cold in 1855

To answer your question Sharron ........ James Wood certainly wasn't on Franklin's last expedition that left England in 1845, because every person aboard died in 1848.

This expedition is a huge part of Canadian lore ............ the ships have been found fairly recently, largely as a result of researchers finally listening to oral stories of the Inuit in the region. Didn't take long to find the ships once that happened!

But Franklin did make earlier voyages, so it must have been one of those that James was on.

Shirley ............. if he really came home from that last voyage, then you know something that the researchers do not seem to know.

Every reference I've seen, and I have to admit that I have only read a very few of the hundreds if not thousands that have been printed over the years, indicates that every man died in the Arctic.

Well I have his death cert and his naval career from the national archives and the book that names him as a witness to a fight on board

He was on HMS Enterprise that went looking for George Franklin

Sorry, I have just looked at Wikipedia, which I don't usually regard as always accurate, and discovered they have Crew Muster Lists for both Erebus and Terror, and seen that about 5 men returned to the UK.

A sailmaker called James Elliott from Woolwich Kent, was on the Terror, and is said to have returned to England from the Whalefish Island in the ship Berretto Junior

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition.

Could they have got his name wrong???


from the Wikipedia article ...........

"At the Whalefish Islands in Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, ten oxen carried on Baretto Junior were slaughtered for fresh meat which was transferred to Erebus and Terror. Crew members then wrote their last letters home, which recorded that Franklin had banned swearing and drunkenness.[27] Five men were discharged[why?] and sent home on Rattler and Barretto Junior, reducing the final crew to 129 men."


NOTE:- the [why?] appears to have been entered by someone wanting clarification of what happened.

No James Wood was the sailmaker on the Enterprise that went looking for George Franklin vessel that was lost

Ah, the Enterprise was a ship that was sent to look for the Erebus and Terror, and returned.

sorry, Shirley, we cross posted.

HMS Enterprise was an Arctic discovery ship laid down as a merchant vessel and purchased in 1848 before launch to search for Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. She made two Arctic voyages before becoming a coal depot, and was finally sold in 1903. She was the tenth Enterprise (or Enterprize) to serve in the Royal Navy.

From google

And

The Voyage of HMS Enterprise ... - Amazon.comwww.amazon.com › Arctic-Hell-Ship-Voyage-Enterpris...
In 1850, Richard Collinson captained the HMS Enterprise on a voyage to the Arctic via the Bering Strait in search of the missing Franklin expedition. Arctic Hell-Ship describes the daily progress of this little-known Arctic expedition, and examines the steadily worsening relations between Collinson and his officers.

[
Enterprise made two voyages to the Arctic, the first via the Atlantic in 1848-1849 under James Clark Ross, then in 1850-1854 via the Pacific and the Bering Strait in an expedition led by Richard Collinson.[2] From 1860 she was lent to the Commissioners of Northern Lights for use as a coal hulk at Oban, and from 1889 she was lent to the Board of Trade. She was sold in 1903.



And there was a fight onboard between two offices and James is mentioned as a witness who had to testify to the captain about what he saw
James is quoted as the sailmaker

Yes, I read that ............

I'm sorry, I misread your first post as that James had been on one of Franklin's ships.

I have just seen that the man I mentioned who told me about the Cyriax book has written a book of his own.

He is Ernest Coleman and his book is called 'No Earthly Pole'.

that could be an interesting book, Sharron