A new watercolour by Robert Hood of the first Franklin expedition

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.

Fact and fancy in history and biography: the case of Greenstockings

Greenstockings was the name that the members of Sir John Franklin's first Arctic Land Expedition gave to a young Dene woman during their winter residence at Fort Enterprise in 1820–21. All the officers' journals remark on her physical beauty, a reputed beauty that subsequently put her at the centre of numerous rumours and accounts. Historians know little about her other than her physical attractiveness and her age, although Greenstockings might have borne a child to one of Franklin's officers, and male jealousy over her might have put the expedition at serious risk. In spite of the paucity of factual information, Greenstockings has been cast as a central character in a poem by Franklin's first wife and in an award-winning book by Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe. These and other pieces of information show the way that different perspectives can allow for different representations of historical figures.