Jane Griffin

This is the page for the traveler, Jane Griffin. For the murderer, see Jane Griffin (murderer)

Jane Griffin (1791 – 18 July 1875) was a British Victorian era traveller better known as Lady Franklin, and the wife of explorer Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in the Arctic in the 1840s on an expedition to find the Northwest Passage.

Lady Franklin sponsored four expeditions to find her husband (in 1850, 1851, 1852 and finally in 1857) and, by means of a sizeable reward for information about him, instigated many more. Her efforts made the expedition's fate one of the most vexed questions of the decade. Ultimately evidence was found by Francis McClintock in 1859 that Sir John had died twelve years previously in 1847. Prior accounts had suggested that in the end the expedition had turned to cannibalism to survive, but Lady Franklin refused to believe these stories and poured scorn on explorer John Rae, who had in fact been the first person to return with definite news of her husband's fate.

She had married Franklin in 1827, his second wife, and joined him on his posting to Australia as governor of Van Diemen's Land, which she renamed Tasmania - this being something of a family tradition since the name 'Australia' had itself been popularised by Franklin's uncle, the explorer Matthew Flinders. In 1839 Lady Franklin became the first European woman to travel overland between Port Phillip and Sydney, and then in 1841-42 she was the first European woman to travel from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour.

After his disappearance in 1845, she never saw her husband again; but the expeditions she supported added considerably to the geographical knowledge of the Arctic circle. In her later years she continued to travel.

External links

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online