TRADITIONAL TEXTILES: Where Does our Cloth Come From?

In today’s world of polyester, acrylic and spandex, traditional textiles and fibres can be increasingly difficult to find when it comes to buying quality clothing. What are the origins of the fibres used to create the textiles which our parents and grandparents grew up with, in the days before manmade fibres started to dominate the fabric-making world?

In this posting, we’ll find out together! We’ll find out what various fibres and textiles are, what they’re used for, and where they come from. While there are a multitude of fibres out there, I’ll just be covering the most common ones in this posting, or it could go on forever!

So rug up, and get comfortable…

COTTON

Used to make all kinds of fabrics, from toweling to velour to seersucker, and used to make all kinds of garments, from shirts, to blouses, to socks, and undergarments, cotton has been cultivated for centuries. That said, cotton, which grows in warm environments, is extremely difficult to harvest! Picking the bolls of cotton from the plants by hand was a slow, labour-intensive, and even painful exercise. Although the plant itself has no thorns or spines, the cotton boll – the bulb, or ‘fruit’ of the cotton plant – can be hard and spiky. When the boll opens, you gain access to the fluffy cotton fibres inside.

Once you’ve picked the cotton, it must then be processed to remove all the seeds caught up inside the fibres – an extremely slow, laborious process which took hours to complete! This is what slaves in the American South had to deal with day in, day out, for weeks on end during harvest-time on cotton-producing plantations back in the 1700s and 1800s. To make cotton-processing easier, Eli Whitney invented the cotton engine, or “Cotton Gin”. Raw, unprocessed cotton fluff was stuffed into one end of the machine, and a crank was turned, spinning a spiked drum. The drum-spikes basically ‘combed’ the cotton fibres through a mesh, teasing them out bit by bit. The mesh was just wide enough to let the cotton fibres through, but not large enough to admit the seeds caught up in the fibres. In this way, the raw cotton fibres could be separated from the seeds, and pure cotton could be gathered up, baled, and shipped out for spinning and weaving into fabric.

Once packed and shipped, raw, processed cotton was sent to cotton mills, either in the northern United States, or across the Atlantic to the UK. Here, it was spun and woven into fabric. The deafening noise of the rattling looms and spinning-wheels caused some cotton-mill workers to go deaf. It’s the origin of the term “Cloth Ears”, meaning an inability to hear properly.

LINEN

Light, airy and breathable, linen is the fabric produced from the fibres of the flax plant. Because of its light weight, softness and absorptive nature, linen fabric is often used for warm-weather clothing. Linen jackets, trousers and suits, linen shirts and handkerchiefs…linen was also used for toweling and bedsheets, which is why we still have the terms “bath linen” and “bed linen” today. Linen is generally the recommended material for summertime clothing because of its thin, strong, breathable, and lightweight construction.

SILK

We’ve all heard of the expression ‘smooth as silk’, but where does silk come from?

Silk is the thread which is extracted from the cocoons of the silkworm (the adorably-named ‘bombix mori’).

Silkworms eating mulberry leaves

Silkworms are now purposefully farmed and bred to produce silk, and the little critters are pretty pampered for the luxurious fibre that they generate. They’re fed almost exclusively on the leaves of the White Mulberry tree, although they can eat a (limited) number of other leaves. Sericulture, the practice of farming silkworms, has a history of at least 5,000 years, and originated in China. For literally thousands of years, China was the main producer, and exporter of silk, and guarded its silk-weaving and silk-farming processes jealously! Europeans loved silk for its softness and smoothness, its strength, and durability, but getting silk was almost impossible. Imperial decrees forbade anybody from detailing to a “foreign barbarian” where, how, when, or with what silk was manufactured, and Europeans remained in ignorance for centuries.

Eventually, knowledge of silk leaked out of China, and by the Middle Ages, silk-farming and production had begun in the Middle East and later, in Europe.

Silk has incredible properties. Spun, and then woven into fabric, it’s incredibly strong and dense, despite its light weight, and this made it ideal for all kinds of garment-making applications. In fact, some of the world’s first bulletproof vests were made of silk! Layers and layers and layers of silk were placed on top of each other, and then firmly stitched and quilted together, to form a thin, but very firm protective cloth padding which was impenetrable by arrows, and even by various types of gunfire. It’s how a lot of body-armour was produced before the invention of kevlar.

WOOL

Shorn from sheep (or lambs), wool has been used for centuries for everything from blankets and bedding, to tunics, hose, trousers, jackets, suits, coats, scarves and mittens. Depending on how it’s been carded, spun, and woven, wool can be anything from soft and plush to thick and fluffy, to smooth and luxurious!

These days, most “wool” garments are not pure wool. To give it strength and durability, it’s usually blended with synthetic fibres (polyester) to create a ‘wool-blend’. High-quality wool-blends are anywhere from 60-40 wool-poly, up to 80-20 or even 90-10 wool-poly. Wool has incredible water-shedding properties, as well as insulation, for warmth. It’s also robust against grime and light stains, and, depending on how it’s constructed – even fireproof!…although for that last quality, you’d want 100% wool construction.

Back in the old days, wool garments were 100% wool, and you can still find that today, if you know where and how to look, but they will cost more.

CASHMERE

Fluffy cashmere goats!

Mmmm…cashmere! Soft, fluffy, smooth, and warm. Cashmere is the name of the wool that is shorn from the Cashmere or “Kashmir” goat, which is native to India and Pakistan. Famed for centuries for its softness, cashmere is used for scarves, socks, coats, and other winter-weather clothing. As with pure-wool fabric, pure-cashmere is expensive. To stretch the budget a bit, cashmere may also be blended, almost always with wool, or sometimes, silk, for a more lightweight finish.

ALPACA

A type of camelid native to South America (in particular, Peru), alpaca wool is again, one more step above just ordinary sheep-wool. What makes Alpaca and Cashmere wool so popular is that the fibres of their wool are so extremely fine. This means that any fabric produced from their wool is both thin, and lightweight, but also incredibly dense, which makes them beautifully soft, and warm. Alpaca wool is used for blankets, scarves, and winter clothes due to its natural insulating properties and luxuriously soft texture.

VICUNA

Ever heard of vicuna? Probably not! That’s hardly surprising, considering that at one point, this little South American camelid was very-nearly extinct! Today, they’re no-longer extinct (yay!!)…but that fact has done little to hide the fact that vicuna wool is the MOST EXPENSIVE WOOL IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

How expensive?

Well, for any reasonably sized vicuna-wool garment (say, a suit, an overcoat, a jacket, etc), you can expect to pay MULTIPLE TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars.

This is because of two main reasons: Vicuna wool is extremely fine and soft, and therefore, dense, and high quality (Oooh, luxury!), but also, because vicuna are small animals, and only produce a relatively tiny amount of wool each year. In an entire year, you’d be lucky to get more than a few tons of fleeces out of the global population of vicunas. Not a few hundred tons, not a few thousand…just…a few tons. And that’s it. And because vicuna only live in South America, you also have to factor in import and transportation costs for this valuable fibre, which drives the already high prices up even higher!…just to get your hands on what would be only a few hundred kilos of wool, if that.






 

The Lost Expedition: Franklin and the Northwest Passage

Ever since ancient times, Europeans have held the Far East in awe, fantasizing that countries such as China, India, Indonesia and Japan were magical kingdoms filled with all kinds of wondrous, rare and amazing commodities – silk, porcelain, tea, spices, beautiful timber, rare dyes, ivory, tortoiseshell, and fascinating jewels! Trade-goods such as ivory, ginger, cinnamon and pepper were exported from China and India all the way to Europe along a network of roadways, rivers and coastal sea-routes which eventually became collectively known as the ‘Silk Road’.

Commodities transported along the Silk Road were rare, expensive, exotic…and open to theft…unscrupulous dealers…confidence artists…spoilage or damage…and all manner of mishap. Added to that the fact that products took literally months to travel from India, Indonesia, Japan or China to Western Europe, and it’s no wonder that the prices paid for these things were astronomical!

To try and keep costs down and to maximise how much they could purchase (and sell) at any one time, European traders increasingly took to shipping vast amounts of exotic goods back to Europe by sea. However, this was expensive, dangerous, and extremely time-consuming, with a round-the-world voyage taking the better part of a year, or more, to complete. Having to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, or Cape Horn, meant that sea-voyages between Europe and Asia were never going to be easy, or safe.

To try and rectify this, ever since the 1500s, and the discovery of the Americas, Europeans had set their sights on trying to find a faster, easier route to Asia – one which didn’t sail around Africa, or around South America, one which could vastly speed up trade between East and West.

What is the Northwest Passage?

The route chosen to try and improve trade between Europe and Asia was one which sailed west across the Atlantic, north, past Greenland, and then west, past the northern coasts of Canada, and then south into the Pacific.

This route became known as the Northwest Passage.

In an era when Europeans were still calling mythical continents “Terra Australis Incognitia” (“Unknown Southern Land”), nobody actually knew whether a Northwest Passage even actually existed!…What if it did? What if it didn’t?

The only way to know for sure was to physically sail to Canada, and map out the entirety of the northern Canadian coastline to find out if it was even possible to sail from the Atlantic coast of Canada to the Pacific.

Numerous expeditions had tried over the years, with little success. Even famed navigator and Royal Navy officer, James Cook, legendary for mapping most of the South Pacific – had tried – and failed – to find the Northwest Passage.

In 1837, King William IV died, and his niece, the 18-year-old Princess Victoria, ascended the British throne as Queen Victoria!

The Victorian era, as the period between 1837-1901 is known, was an age of optimism, determination, confidence, and great technological advancements! Huge progress was made in the fields of medicine, manufacturing, industry, technology and communications during this time. It was for all these reasons that, in the 1840s, Britain decided that it was time for another crack at the Northwest Passage!

Equipping the Franklin Expedition

In the 1840s, the British Admiralty decided that the time was ripe for another expedition to the Northwest Passage. To lead this daring venture into the frozen north, it selected what it thought, was the best man for the job: Captain Sir John Franklin.

Born in 1786, Franklin was a man of considerable accomplishment. A veteran of the Napoleonic wars, and naval officer who fought alongside Admiral Nelson, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and former Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Franklin was used to a rough life, and spending years away from home – both of which would be vital qualities required of any leader of such a perilous expedition! Franklin was also selected for his intelligence – of all the letters after his name and title, were three which were possibly, the most impressive: FRS. Fellow of the Royal Society!

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge – or the Royal Society, for short – is the oldest surviving, and most famous, learned society in the world. Since its establishment by royal charter by King Charles II in 1660, it has been at the forefront of scientific, technological and medical research and advancements for the past 360 years! Membership to the Royal Society is strictly by invitation ONLY, and to be invited to become a member (or more precisely, to be granted a ‘fellowship’) is not only a gigantic honour, but also confirmation of one’s vast contributions to the worlds of science and technology!

Famous fellows of the society included Sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Stephen Hawking, Sir David Attenborough, Charles Darwin, and brainiac-of-brainiacs: Albert Einstein!

To gain admission to the Royal Society is so difficult that surely anybody who held the letters FRS after their name, was certainly not going to be some addlepated dunderhead, right? As if the powers-that-be needed even more convincing – Franklin had already headed a number of other expeditions to the Arctic in previous years! What else could one ask for? The Admiralty was convinced, and duly appointed Franklin to be expedition leader.

The Ships: Darkness and Terror…

With its leader selected, the next task was to find some way of getting the crew through the Arctic. The Admiralty selected two ships: The Erebus, and the Terror! Erebus is named for Erebos – Greek God of Darkness!

Two ships. Darkness, and Terror.

Sounds like a good omen!

A model of Sir John Franklin’s flagship – the HMS Erebus

To survive the long, likely multi-year voyage through the Arctic, the two ships were renovated or “fitted out” to be as well-built for their new task as possible. The two ships had already proved themselves capable of arctic exploration in the past – in the 1830s, both vessels had sailed in company to Antarctica with Sir James Clark Ross (after whom the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica is named), but the British Admiralty wasn’t taking any chances when it came to trying to find the mythical Northwest Passage.

To this end, the ships’ hulls were reinforced with iron plates and rivets to guard against crushing ice, striking icebergs, and slamming into rocks. The interiors were fitted out with cabins, galleys, toiletry facilities, libraries, an infirmary and physician’s offices, and the holds were modified to fit as many of the essential supplies as possible. As a further safeguard, they were also subdivided into watertight compartments, just like on later ships like the Titanic, to try and reduce the dangers of flooding if the ships were holed by ice.

On the technological side, the ships were equipped with steam engines and propellers, and even a rudimentary, steam-powered central-heating system, to keep the ships at least moderately comfortable in the freezing sub-zero temperatures that the crew were certain to encounter. To make sure that the ships weren’t rendered impotent and immovable by some sort of mechanical breakdown during the voyage, even diving suits were included in the equipment-stores, so that underwater repairs could be made.

Food and Drink for the Voyage

The Franklin Expedition was expecting to be away from civilisation for at least two to three years, during which time, they would have to survive almost entirely on whatever food they had brought with them. To this end, the ships were almost exclusively provisioned with one of the greatest wonder-products of the Victorian age!

Canned food.

Canned, and bottled food, have existed since the late 1700s. Canning started becoming really popular in the Georgian era, when Napoleon Bonaparte insisted that somebody had to come up with a convenient way of packaging large quantities of food so that it could be transported easily, stored safely, and wouldn’t spoil for weeks, months or even years at a time.

Food that was canned and sealed tight could last almost indefinitely – a useful trait for an expedition that would be away from civilisation for up to three years! Early canned food was packaged so well that the cans were nigh impossible to open! Soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars were given canned food as rations, but exactly how the hell you get into them – well – that was a matter of ingenuity! Bayonets, axes, hammers, chisels, pocketknives, and even the odd musket-round were all used to try and crack open the almost impregnable containers to gain access to the food within! Canning was almost too effective for its own good!

One of Stephen Goldner’s original cans, as used on the Franklin Expedition, discovered in the 1870s. Now in the National Maritime Museum in the UK. Can-openers not being invented until at least 1855, the Goldner cans were ‘opened’ using a hammer and chisel to cut a hole in the lid

The task of provisioning the Erebus and Terror with the necessary rations was given to industrialist Stephen Goldner. On the 1st of April, 1845 – April Fools’ Day – an order of…wait for it…8,000 cans of various types of foodstuffs…were to be prepared in just SEVEN weeks! If this was Franklin’s idea of an April Fools’ Day prank, then Goldner was not impressed, and while he tried his best to meet the order, the need to cook, pack, lid, and solder, over a thousand cans of food a week – all done by hand, remember – led to inevitable quality-control issues. In the understandable haste, lids were improperly placed on the cans, and the lead-based solder used to ensure an airtight seal between the lid and the can itself was unevenly and sloppily applied by workers who were rushing to meet deadlines. This led to some cans being left with tiny holes and gaps in the solder, or even instances where the lead solder leaked into the food due to improper application!

Whoops…

While Goldner’s canning company provided the crew with the majority of their everyday food, for more specialised, luxury provisions – and what good Victorian exploratory expedition could be without those – the ships’ officers turned to another supplier: Fortnums!

Founded in London in 1707, Fortnum & Mason has, for over 300 years, been one of the most famous department-stores in the world. Specialising in exotic and luxury foodstuffs, Fortnum’s has been patronised by almost every great explorer in history, from Sir Edmund Hilary to Earl Carnarvon and Howard Carter – and the officers of the Franklin expedition were no exception!

Along with the food, equal attention (or perhaps, rather more attention) was paid to something which was…rather more important: What the crew would drink during the voyage. As it would be impossible to bring along enough drinking water, wine, rum, grog, brandy and scotch for a trip expected to last at least two years, the Erebus, and the Terror were fitted out with a new innovation: Desalination plants! These water-filtration systems would be able to process seawater pumped up from the ocean and onto the ships, and make it drinkable, giving the crew – in theory – an endless supply of fresh, drinkable, desalinated water!

The Crew of the Franklin Expedition

Everybody knew that going to the Great White North was going to be a perilous and possibly fatal endeavour. Because of this, the Franklin Expedition had to choose its crew with great care. In total, the two ships – Erebus and Terror, were loaded with 134 men: 24 officers, and 110 seamen and other crew.

Among the crew were four surgeons, two blacksmiths, cooks, stewards, four stokers (to handle the steam-engines), royal marines, engineers, and dozens and dozens of able seamen. Added to this were the two captains: Of the Erebus – Captain Sir John Franklin himself, and of the Terror, Captain Francis Rawdon Crozier.

The two ships were fully provisioned and equipped, crewed and loaded, and left England on the 19th of May, 1845.

The Trip to Greenland

The first leg of Franklin’s voyage was from England to Greenland. Departing as they did, on the 19th of May, the ships sailed north, first to Scotland, and thence to Greenland. During this part of the voyage, the two arctic ships were accompanied by two more ships bringing up the rear with extra supplies and equipment. When the ships arrived in Greenland, the supply ships loaded their cargoes into the two arctic ships and prepared to head for home. Unnecessary equipment, cargoes, and all outgoing mail from the two expedition ships were loaded onto these ships during the expedition’s stay in Greenland, so that they could be returned to England. Along with all the mail and other things that wouldn’t be going on this epic voyage of discovery, were five men:

Thomas Burt, an armourer (aged 22), William Aitken, a royal marine (aged 37), James Elliot, a 20-year-old sailmaker, Robert Carr (another armourer, aged 23), and an able seaman named John Brown.

The five men, one from the Erebus, and four from the Terror, were excused participation in the expedition on the grounds of health – all five men had fallen ill, although what of was not recorded. They were loaded onto the departing supply ship, and went with it when it returned to England.

They didn’t know it yet, but these five men would later count their lucky stars to be the only members of the expedition to ever return alive.

The Voyage to the Great White North

Once the ships had been re-provisioned, and all necessary supplies and shopping had been accounted for and completed, the next step in the voyage was the most perilous: entering the Arctic Ocean!

With their modern, canned provisions, central heating, steam engines, desalination plants, and even the first, rudimentary daguerreotype cameras, everybody back home in England felt that the Franklin Expedition was by far the best-equipped and most prepared crew that had ever set out to tackle the ferocity of the frozen north, and if they couldn’t find the Northwest Passage…if indeed such a passage even existed!…then nobody would!

The ships left Greenland at the height of summer, and sailed northwest, towards Canada. The aim was to reach the Arctic during the warmest months of the year, to give them as much time as possible to explore the region before the all-too-short Arctic warm season faded away, and they would be doomed to spending months trapped in the ice, waiting for the spring thaw the next year.

By the 28th of July, 1845, the ships had crossed Baffin Bay off the west coast of Greenland. It was at this point that the ships were spotted by two whalers sailing south – the Enterprise and the Prince of Wales. This would be the last time that any of the Franklin crew, or their two ships – would be spotted by European eyes. It was shortly after this that the Erebus and the Terror disappeared into the frozen, merciless embrace of the Arctic, to begin their expedition proper.

The Sea of the Midnight Sun

Exactly what happened to the remaining 129 men of the Franklin Expedition from July 28th onwards, can only ever be guessed at. Few written records remain, and what eyewitness accounts that there were (by Inuit eskimoes native to northern Canada) were initially, largely discarded as fanciful, overblown and inaccurate, by rescuers who refused to believe the truth of what had actually taken place so far from civilisation.

1845: The First Year

The Erebus and the Terror sailed in company westwards from Baffin Bay and into the frozen wastes of the Arctic Ocean. With only scant maps to guide them, and absolutely no ability to rely on compass-bearings (being so close to the North Pole, magnetic compasses were useless), the crew had to rely on the positions of the sun, stars and moon to navigate.

The Arctic summer was particularly cold that year, and progress was slow. By the time the ice started to freeze up again in the approaching winter, the two vessels had only made it as far as Cornwallis Island. Unable to go any further, Franklin and his crew made the decision to stop here for the winter. The ships were anchored off the coast of a tiny, gravely outpost sticking up out of the water – Beechey Island.

The Beechey Island graves, three from Franklin’s expedition, and one from a later rescue mission in the 1850s

Along with being their winter camping-site, Beechey was also where the crew of the Franklin Expedition farewelled the first three of their own: John Torrington (Petty Officer), William Braine (private, Royal Marines), and John Hartnell (Able Seaman). Later autopsies on the corpses determined that the three men had died of what the Victorians called ‘Consumption’ – or tuberculosis.

1846: The Second Year

With the spring thaw, the ships started moving forward once more. It was Franklin’s job to find the fastest, safest route through the Arctic to the Pacific Ocean, and to try and achieve this, he was determined to avoid the more extreme, more northern routes that might be available to him, and instead stick to southern passages through the Arctic. After mapping Cornwallis Island, the Franklin expedition had two choices to make:

They could either sail directly west, between Melville Island to the north, and Victoria Island to the south, and out into the Arctic Ocean, or else south, between Prince-of-Wales Island and Somerset Island.

Not wishing to linger in extremely-northern latitudes for any longer than was absolutely necessary, Franklin’s crew elected to sail south, reasoning that it might be warmer, and therefore, easier to navigate. To this end, they sailed from Cornwallis Island through Peel Sound, a stretch of water between Prince-of-Wales Island to the west, and Somerset Island, to the east.

What nobody aboard the Erebus or the Terror could’ve known at the time was that they were sailing into a deathtrap.

‘The Erebus in the Ice – 1846’, a painting by Belgian artist Francois Musin

The problem with sailing south during the spring thaw of 1846 through the Sound was that this was the exact same route that all the sheet-ice, icebergs and growlers took, when they too, broke free from other bodies of ice, and started drifting! Currents drove them south towards Canada, and Franklin’s two ships soon found themselves trapped in the mother of all arctic traffic-jams! Had they sailed west, the ice would simply have floated past them as the expedition made for the open sea past Melville Island, but by going south – the Franklin ships ended up going in the exact same direction as all the ice that they were trying so desperately to avoid! The result? The ships became stuck in ice. Again.

At first, Franklin’s crew were unphased. After all, they knew that something like this was likely to happen, and so once they had made as much forward progress as they could, they dropped anchor off King William Island on the 12th of September, 1846, and prepared to make winter camp, yet again. Not wishing to stay onboard the ships in case they broke free of the ice prematurely, or were crushed by the compacting force of more ice piling up behind them, the crew instead offloaded necessary supplies from the ships and set up camp on King William Island itself, where they would be safe from the risk of ice cracking, breaking and splitting apart if the floes and sheets shifted unexpectedly.

1847: The Third Year

By early 1847, it was time to start moving again. The spring thaw had come and while the ice did start breaking up, as it should’ve done, it wasn’t nearly as much as one might’ve expected. The ships moved at literally a glacial speed, limited entirely by the movement (or lack of movement) of the ice which surrounded them.

At the end of Peel Sound, the two ships once again reached a junction where they would have to make a decision: Sail east, around King William Island, or sail south, past the island, and then westwards past Victoria Island and continue onwards to find the Northwest Passage.

Unsure of the exact geography of King William Island, and whether or not they would be able to sail all the way around it, the ships chose to stick to their current route and sail south.

Again, it was a decision that they would come to regret. What none of them could’ve known was that by sailing east and around King William Island, they would avoid the heaviest ice-floes, popping out near the southern coast, and then sailing on past Victoria Island’s southern coastline and towards the Pacific. By sailing directly past King William Island’s western coast, however, they were headed into a virtual logjam of ice, which packed together in an immovable, frozen barrier, their movement slowed to a crawl thanks to all the small islands that bridged the gap between Victoria and King William Islands.

It was through this narrow, congested, ice-clogged channel that the two ships now had to navigate.

The men tried everything to get through the ice. Axes, sledgehammers, chisels and ice-saws were used to cleave, slice and cut through the ice, which was several inches, or even feet thick, but their efforts yielded negligible results, with the ships barely crawling forwards. In desperation, the men even resorted to using more dangerous (but also more effective) mining techniques to get through the ice!

Using augers, the men drilled shafts into the ice, and packed them with gunpowder. The powder was tamped down and fuses were lit. The explosions fractured the ice, but not nearly enough to break it into manageable chunks, once again forcing the men to expend valuable calories in shifting the tons of ice by using hand-tools.

By May, 1847, the ice remained just as immovable as ever, and it was at this point that the crews started to lose hope. With explosives running low, no coal to fire the engines, and the men exhausted from the freezing cold and backbreaking labour, morale started to plummet among the crews.

What happened next is only known thanks to a message, stored in a metal tube and hidden in a cairn (a pile of stones built up to form a pillar) that was left by the Franklin crew. Dated the 28th of May, 1847, it stated that four days previously on the 24th, a party of eight men (two officers and six men) had left the winter encampment on King William Island, and were attempting to explore and map the island. The note concluded “All Well”.

1848: The Fourth Year

Whatever the hopes of the Franklin crew might’ve been, they appeared to have vanished quickly. Just a few weeks after the note in the cairn had been written, Captain Sir John Franklin died, on the 11th of June, 1847. With the ice refusing to thaw for a second year in a row, the men remained trapped on King William Island throughout 1847 and into 1848, where the ice…AGAIN…refused to melt!

The original message in the cairn – AKA the ‘Victory Point Note’

Getting desperate, the men decided that the time had come to look to their own salvation, and to abandon the mission entirely. On the 25th of April, the cairn was revisited, and the note extracted from within. An addendum was written on the few inches of remaining paper, stating that Franklin had died, and that the crew were abandoning their ships to the Arctic pack-ice. By now, twenty-four additional men had died. From 134 to begin with, minus 5, left them with 129. Minus Franklin was 128, minus 23 others, was 105 surviving crew.

Exactly what the twenty-four men (of which Franklin was one), had died of is not recorded, although later examination of the bodies revealed a mix of scurvy, tuberculosis, pneumonia, hypothermia, and lead poisoning.

Deciding that it was safer to leave the ships and head south to find civilisation, the crews took the drastic step of lowering the ships’ lifeboats onto the ice. Packing the lifeboats with all the available food, tools and other equipment that they might possibly need, the remaining 100-odd men, after consulting a few charts, made for Back River, 250 miles away, to the south. They reasoned that, if they could reach the river, then they could sail the boats south, and find help.

And so, on the 26th of April, 1848, pulling lifeboats and sledges packed with food and materiel, the 105 surviving crew started off on the journey that they hoped, would lead to their own salvation. Leaving the ships behind, they headed to King William Island, and started the agonising, freezing, painful and exhausting trek south.

With little water, freezing temperatures, snowstorms, dwindling provisions of increasingly questionable edibility, and suffering from everything from frostbite to scurvy, lead-poisoning and pneumonia, the men headed off into the frigid arctic wastes towards Back River, never to be seen again.

The Franklin Rescue Missions

Franklin’s crew had been forewarned that they should expect to spend at least two years, if not three, in the freezing north of the Canadian archipelago, and that they would not likely return home for many, many years. Everybody knew this. Franklin knew it, Crozier, his second in command, knew it, the admirality knew it, and Lady Franklin, Sir John’s wife, also knew it.

It was for this reason that two whole years passed, before any great concern was raised about what might be happening to the Franklin crew. In 1847, Lady Jane Franklin started getting worried, and began a gentle pressure on the Admiralty to send out a search party to try and find her husband.

The Admiralty, however…decided not to. They saw no need. After all, the Franklin Expedition was expected to be gone for up to three years! There was surely no need to panic! Not yet, anyway. However, not everybody shared the Admiralty’s confidence in the Franklin crew.

One of the men who didn’t was a certain fiction author and journalist, a man who was a close, personal friend of Lady Franklin – a man named Charles Dickens. Using his journal, Household Words, Dickens and Lady Franklin roused up public support for a rescue mission, and between 1848 to 1858, nearly four dozen search-and-rescue missions were launched to try and find the Lost Expedition, with Lady Franklin personally sponsoring…wait for it…SIX different expeditions to try and find her husband, or else, to discover his fate!

So…what happened to Sir John Franklin?

Franklin’s Lost Expedition

Exactly what happened to Franklin’s expedition has been a mystery for over 170 years. Nobody knows all the facts, and nobody knows all the truths. What is known is gleamed from what few scant documents and relics that could be found, and what eyewitness accounts the search-and-rescue teams could gleam from local Inuit natives. So, what did happen to the Franklin crew?

What follows is the most widely-accepted and, believed-to-be, accurate timeline of events.

April 26th, 1848. After two winters and two summers trapped in the ice, the Franklin crew decide to abandon their vessels, pack what supplies they can carry onto sledges and lifeboats, and trek south to Back River, to try and save their own skins.

The 104 remaining men drag their supplies onto King William Island, and head due south. It is freezing cold and the going is impossibly hard. There are no trees, no grass, no bushes…no vegetation of any kind. Just freezing wind and scattered limestone shale all over the place. The exhausted, hungry, starving men are struggling to heave the massive lifeboats along, stopping every few hours for rest and food, or to try and make camp.

This is what we know, according to all surviving written records. What happened next was gleamed from testimony taken from local Inuit Eskimos living in the area.

Unable to make it to the river, the men returned to the ships, deciding that it was safer to stay aboard them, rather than risk their lives out in the open. In 1849, when they felt stronger, they started out again in smaller groups, heading south once more.

With rations almost exhausted, the crew learn how to hunt seals and caribou to survive. Where possible, the Inuit assist them, either in hunting, or in butchering their kills. Each party thanks the other, using gifts of meat to repay each others’ kindnesses. The men learn how to cook their kills by starting fires using seal-blubber for fuel.

Slowly, parties of men of greater and lesser numbers, start to leave the Erebus to try and once again, make the perilous trek south.

During the winter of 1849-1850, the Inuit witness the crew performing a military-style burial ceremony. It is believed to be the funeral of Captain Franklin’s second-in-command – Captain Francis M. Crozier, officer in command of the Terror.

Captain Francis Crozier, photographed in 1845 before his departure on the Franklin Expedition

After this, more Inuit witnessed more crews of men still trying to head south. One group of up to forty men were witnessed dragging a boat behind them. They later speak of coming across a campsite littered with dead bodies, racked by starvation, cold and disease. Examinations of the bodies…or what’s left of them, anyway…caused the bleak prospect of cannibalism to rise to the surface…a fate later confirmed by proper autopsies.

By summer, 1850, the ice finally thaws. The remaining crew try to get the Erebus moving again, but severely weakened and ill, they almost all succumb to starvation and disease. Inuit recall boarding the ship to find the men dead in their cabins.

After this, in 1851, the Inuit locals report the existence of four more men. Accompanied by a dog, they head west. Who these men are, where they ended up, and what became of them is unknown. These men – whoever they are, and whatever became of them – are believed to be the last survivors of the Franklin Expedition.

These details, pieced together from written records, eyewitness testimonies from the Inuit, and relics and evidence recovered during the several fruitless searches for the Franklin crew, are all that are conclusively known about the fate of the men. Between buried bodies, human remains, and a single ship’s lifeboat with two corpses inside it, there was precious little to go on, and by the end of the 1850s, it was conclusively proven that the Franklin Expedition – widely believed to be the most well-prepared, well-stocked, most technologically-advanced polar expedition ever assembled – had been a horrifying, abject and abysmal failure, which tested mankind’s resolve and limits to so far beyond their breaking-points that polite, Victorian-era society scarcely dared to believe it.

Why did the Franklin Expedition Fail?

The loss of the Franklin Expedition is one of the great human tragic mysteries of the world, up there with the abandonment of the Mary Celeste, the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony, and the loss of the S.S. Waratah.

What happened? How did it happen? Why? These were the questions that Lady Franklin, the Admiralty, and the millions of people all over the world, demanded answers to, when the worst was finally revealed in the years following the exhaustive search-and-rescue efforts made in the 1850s.

So, what exactly went wrong?

The Ships

On the surface, the Erebus and the Terror looked like the ideal vessels for the Franklin Expedition. They were robust, well-built warships which had already proved themselves in arctic exploration well before they were selected as the vessels which would convey the Franklin crews to glory! The ships had been strengthened, reinforced with iron sheeting, had had central heating installed, and steam-engines with propellers and comfortable quarters prepared for the men. So, what went wrong?

Before they were used to convey Franklin and his men into the pages of history, the Erebus and the Terror had been used by Sir James C. Ross, during his explorations of Antarctica. And before that, the two vessels had been bomb ships! Bomb ships were a type of warship designed to fire mortar-rounds, instead of the conventional cannon-shot that most sailing warships would’ve used. They were literally used to bombard the enemy – hence ‘bomb ships’.

Deck-plans of the Erebus

Because of this, their construction meant that they had to be very stable, to withstand the powerful recoil of the mortars going off on their decks. This meant that they were heavy, and had low centers of gravity, to reduce the risk of them capsizing and rolling over from the recoil of the mortars. This is great in battle, and even great when you’re sailing through the depths of the Southern Ocean…but it’s useless up in the Canadian archipelago! These heavy, ungainly ships with their deep drafts were unsuited for the shallow waters of the Arctic, especially when it came to weaving through the dozens of little islands immediately north of the Canadian mainland.

In the 1840s, the two ships had been converted to steam-propulsion, but crudely. Steamships did exist in the 1840s, but the engines installed on these two vessels had one great flaw – they weren’t maritime engines! Instead of purpose-built ship’s engines, the Erebus and the Terror were fitted out with small steam-locomotive engines used to power trains! Weighing up to 15 tons each, the engines were of a poor and inefficient design, and nowhere near powerful enough to generate the horsepower required to move the ships forward at any appreciable speed, or for any great distance, partially because neither were they given anywhere near enough coal! When the ships had been provisioned in England, only 120 tons each of coal, had been provided to them. At 10 tons a day, this would last just 12 days.

12 days’ worth of coal, for a voyage expected to last three years.

Because of this, the engines were almost never used. It took too long to heat them up, boil the water, create the steam and drive the engines to move the ships…and the engines weren’t nearly powerful enough, anyway. Why the Erebus and the Terror hadn’t been fitted out with proper maritime engines is unknown, but the end-result was the same: The engines, being underpowered and rarely used – were nothing but dead weight at the bottom of the ships, making already slow vessels even slower.

The Food

It’s long been believed that one of the main contributing factors to the disaster of the Franklin expedition was the food that the men ate during the voyage. The vast majority of it was canned. In theory, this was a good idea. Canned food is easy to store, easy to ration, takes up less space, is easier to cook and easier to serve.

But only if it’s done properly.

The cans of food and beverages used on the Franklin expedition were poorly sealed and the food was not properly prepared. This led to spoilage, leakage, and loss of nutritional value. The result? The men started suffering from the one disease that all seamen lived in mortal terror of: Scurvy, caused by a crippling lack of Vitamin C.

Scurvy had been the nightmare-fuel of sailors for hundreds of years, even before the Franklin expedition set out. In the 1700s, it was discovered that citrus juices could prevent scurvy, and to this end, the Royal Navy instituted a system whereby every sailor was given generous quantities of grog every day, to keep scurvy at bay. Grog was a mix of rum, watered down with lime or lemon-juice. This sweet-and-sour cocktail, a mix of booze and vitamins, kept sailors hydrated, healthy, and happy.

The canned provisions might’ve done as well, if they had been prepared properly. But apart from the lack of vitamin C, the canned food posed another great danger: Botulism. When food (especially meat) goes bad, the bacteria known as Clostridium Botulinum starts to form, which can lead to symptoms such as sight problems, speech problems and fatigue – all of which would be exacerbated by the freezing cold of the Arctic.

Navigational Issues

Another huge problem for the crew, apart from the shortcomings of their ships and the deficiencies in their provisions, was the much more unmanageable problem of dealing with navigation.

To find your way around the world in the 1840s, you needed three pieces of equipment: A sextant to tell you your latitude, or North-South position, a chronometer or clock, to tell you your longitude, or East-West position, and a compass, with which to give you your direction, or ‘heading’. Compasses are magnetic. They will always point towards the magnetic North Pole, which as we know, is populated by a fat guy in a red suit who runs the world’s largest toy factory!

The problem with magnetic compasses is that the Magnetic North Pole moves. A lot. The rotation of the Earth means that the pole is constantly shifting – more than once throughout the Earth’s history, the poles have flipped completely, and then flipped back again! In most latitudes, this isn’t an issue – the North Pole (ie: True North) is so far away that these slight variations in movement made by Magnetic North are imperceptible, and a general northerly bearing is usually sufficient to guide a ship along its route – if it needs a more accurate fix – well! – that’s what the chronometer and sextant are for!

But the problem is that the shifting poles and questionable compass readings get more and more extreme the further north or south you go. Right up in the Arctic Circle, with the pole moving all the time, the compasses get completely disoriented as they try to keep up with the shifting magnetism of the North Pole. The result?

The compasses don’t point north. They don’t, because they can’t, and they can’t, because they point to Magnetic North, which, as I said, is constantly moving. This leads to the very real problem of your compasses being completely useless. You can’t rely on them at all to point the way, and can only manage to do so by maps, stars and the position of the sun…if the sun will deign to rise, that is – in the Arctic Circle, that isn’t always guaranteed.

Along with faulty compass readings came the added strain of trying to navigate a seascape which had very few accurate charts. No complete maps of the Canadian Archipelago existed in the early 1800s, and for the first time since the search for Australia in the 1700s, mankind found itself quite literally sailing off the edge of the map.

This inability to rely on maps meant that every directional change the crew made would be a literal, and figurative – shot in the dark. They had no idea what lay ahead, or what to expect. Instead of sailing west, they sailed south. Instead of sailing east, they sailed west. Instead of trying to avoid the ice, the Erebus and the Terror found themselves trapped in endless floes which refused to melt for years on end!

Captain Sir John Franklin

The last factor which spelled doom for the Franklin Expedition was, arguably, Sir John Franklin himself. While he was an arctic veteran, a famous explorer, naval hero and man of letters who was immensely popular with the British public, and well-liked by his crew, Franklin did have a number of shortcomings that made him less than ideal for the mission at hand.

Sir John Barrow

Franklin’s unsuitability as expedition-leader is borne out by the fact that he wasn’t even the Admiralty’s first choice for leader! Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, and the man in charge of finding the crew to man the expedition, had hoped to convince the elderly Sir John Ross to come out of retirement and head the expedition. Ross was a famous naval officer and arctic explorer of note, but he was already approaching old age, and had no desire to go to sea – especially on such a risky mission as this!

Admiral Sir John Ross

Barrow’s second choice was Sir James Clark Ross – Sir John’s equally-famous and well-accomplished nephew, another famous polar explorer! Unfortunately, Sir James had just gotten married, and, like his uncle, had no desire to go gallivanting off around the world at such short notice!…especially when he had far more interesting diversions waiting for him at home.

Barrow’s THIRD choice for commander was an Irishman named Francis Rawdon Crozier – another polar-exploration veteran of note. While Crozier was experienced, Barrow wanted an Englishman to head the expedition, and since his first two choices had bowed out and his third was not ideal, he finally settled on Sir John Franklin – Option #4!…Ouch!

Sir James Clark Ross, Sir John’s nephew, and a noted polar explorer in his own right

At 59, Franklin was already approaching old-age by Victorian standards. While he was a naval officer, and a polar explorer, and certainly had the intelligence to get himself admitted to the prestigious Royal Society, Franklin had many shortcomings as well. Although he was a popular hero, and was well-liked by the men under his command, whom he treated with kindness, consideration and respect, the fact of the matter was that Franklin was stubborn, hotheaded, took unnecessary risks, and didn’t always respond positively to well-meaning advice.

Captain Sir John Franklin, photographed in 1845 before his departure on the Erebus

All these faults led to his near-death in 1819, when he attempted an overland expedition from Canada to the Canadian Archipelago, to find the Northwest Passage by land. His foolhardiness and inattention led to eleven of his 20-man crew dying of cold and starvation. By the time they abandoned the mission and his men had convinced Franklin to turn back, the remaining men were close to death themselves. Franklin survived by literally cutting up and eating the leather uppers on his hiking boots! This humiliating end to what was supposed to be glorious victory of exploration, led to him being mercilessly lampooned as the “man who ate his own shoes”!

All these issues – the failings of the ships, the problems with the food, and nutrition and health of the crew, and the navigational challenges and uncertainties faced by the navigators aboard the two ships are what led to what was supposed to be the most well-equipped polar expedition in history, going down as one of the greatest exploratory failures of the Victorian era.

In the end, the first successful maritime navigation of the Northwest Passage took place in 1906 under the command of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Unlike Franklin, Amundsen had the good sense to turn EAST when he reached King William Island instead of continuing south – and that made all the difference. By turning east, he was able to sail around the island and pop out the bottom. All the tiny islands north of him (through which the Franklin Expedition had attempted to sail) now worked in Amundsen’s favour, instead of against him, like with Franklin. The islands which formed the bottleneck of icebergs and field-ice that had so impeded the Franklin expedition, kept the waterways past Victoria Island relatively ice-free, allowing Amundsen a clear passage westwards towards the Pacific Ocean!

What Happened to Erebus and Terror?

Everything I’ve written about thusfar, has just about covered the various fates of the crew, but what about the ships that they left behind? The Erebus and the Terror. What happened to them?

Again, the only way to be sure of anything, is to go by Inuit testimony. The ships were known to be above ice throughout the 1840s, but by the early 1850s, were starting to fall victim to the crushing ice that had by now, surrounded them for years. The Terror succumbed first – carried south by the crushing ice, the ship finally broke apart and sank off the southwest coast of King William Island in an area now known as Terror Bay in honour of the lost ship.

The Erebus was marginally more successful – the pack-ice had drawn the ship south along with its sister-ship, but instead of crushing the ship to matchsticks, the ice thawed enough for it to start moving again, although it did not get very far.

In 2014 and 2016, the wrecks of the Erebus and the Terror (in that order) were discovered by Canadian maritime explorers. To protect their historical integrity, the exact location of the wrecks was (and still is) a closely guarded secret, so as to prevent recreational divers from attempting to find them. The British Government, the official owner of the two shipwrecks, gifted them to the Canadian government, which later entrusted the safekeeping and guarding of the wrecks to the Inuit people, through whose territory the two ships had tried to sail, all those years ago. Among the artifacts raised from the ships was the bell of the Erebus.

The President and the Expedition

The Lost Expedition of Sir John Franklin, and their noble quest to find the Northwest Passage, happened back in 1845, over 170 years ago, and yet, in the 21st century, one particularly poignant reminder of the expedition’s great peril remains with us still. It’s likely that you’ve seen it on TV. Several times, in fact. It’s likely that you’ve seen it in photographs, on the internet, on Youtube, in TV shows, and even in big-name Hollywood movies!

Even if it wasn’t what it is, it would still be an immensely famous artifact, and yet, this irreplaceable piece of history is quite literally overlooked, every single day, without most people realising even in the slightest – what it actually is.

What is this artifact, you ask?

The Resolute Desk in pride of place at the Oval Office in the Biden White House

The desk of the president of the United States of America.

Gifted to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 by Queen Victoria as a token of goodwill between the two nations of America and the United Kingdom, the desk – popularly known as the “Resolute Desk”, was made from the timbers of the British warship HMS Resolute, when it was broken up in the 1870s. The desk is one of three that were commissioned by Queen Victoria when the ship was finally scrapped. The other two are the “Grinnell Desk”, and a smaller ladies’ writing-desk, made for the queen herself.

The Resolute was one of the several ships which in the 1850s, sailed to the Arctic to try and find Franklin’s Lost Expedition. Had it not been for much better planning, the crew of the Resolute could’ve joined the crew of the Erebus and the Terror in their icy fate! When the Resolute got stuck in the ice, the crew decided to abandon ship, and sought refuge on an accompanying vessel which sailed them back to safety. Fearing that their ship would, like the Franklin ships, be crushed into matchsticks by the tons of ice and then sunk, they never expected to see it again. However, to everybody’s amazement, the ship broke free of the ice in the spring thaw, and drifted around the North Atlantic for years, before it was discovered by American whaling ships and sailed back to America.

The Plaque on the Resolute Desk

The ship was restored to full working condition, with replacement rigging, sails and flags, and was returned to the Royal Navy as a gesture of goodwill between the United States and the United Kingdom. Years later, the gesture was reciprocated in the giving of the Resolute Desk – which to this day, still bears a plaque on it detailing its role in the Franklin expedition.

Want to Read More?

For the sake of brevity, I haven’t covered everything about the Franklin Expedition in detail. If you want to find out more, here’s the sources I used…

https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/History/antarctic_ships/Franklin-north-west-passage-timeline.php

http://maps.canadiangeographic.ca/franklin-search-timeline/franklin-search-timeline.asp

History Buffs: “The Terror”

“The Search for the Northwest Passage” (Pt 1)

 

Popping Pills: Restoring an Apothecary’s Pill-Rolling Machine

This gorgeous artifact and fascinating piece of medical history is the latest addition to my collection of antique brassware, and is also the latest thing I won at the local auction-house…

“Ooooooh!” I hear you say.

“Wussit do?” I hear you say.

“Can I have one??” I hear you say.

Well…uh…no, you can’t have one! I’ve been chasing one of these for five years, and I finally got one!

“Awww…okay fine!…But…w-whassit do?”

Well, it’s a pill-rolling machine, from the Victorian era! Ain’t it neat?

No, seriously dude…what does it actually, like…really, do?

…I just told you. It’s a pill-rolling machine!

I know, I know, it looks like some sort of antique cheese-grater, but yes, this is actually a pill-making machine, and back in the mid-1800s, no self-respecting apothecary would’ve been without one of these proudly on display on his shop counter!

“So how does it work?” I hear you ask, “And I mean…why does it exist? I thought pills were made in factories and stuff?”

Uh, yes…they are…now. But 150 years ago, they weren’t. In this post I’ll be talking about what this device is, how it works and what it does, I’ll also be going into a few of the differences between pharmacies today, and how they were, a hundred and fifty-odd years ago, in the middle of the 19th century, when this pill-rolling machine was invented…

Your Friendly Village Apothecary

This machine dates back to the days when your local pharmacist or apothecary bought, sold, and manufactured all his own drugs, medicines and curatives to everybody who lived within the bounds of a given community, and when the dispensing, manufacturing and purchasing of medicine was very different to how it’s done today.

These days, we get sick, we go to the doctor, he’ll give us a script, we’ll take it to the pharmacist, he’ll read it off, get the medicine, give it to us and we’ll walk out of his shop with a bottle of pills, a tube of paste, a jar of ointment, and a bag of diabetic jellybeans.

Back in the 1850s and 1860s, when machines like this were invented, how you got your medicine was very different.

For one thing, you likely didn’t even go to the doctor! Back in Victorian times, physicians were usually far beyond the reach, financially, of most people. Your average, workaday schmoe likely never met a doctor professionally, unless it was a real emergency. On a day-to-day basis, most poor and middle-class people would visit the pharmacist or apothecary for the majority of their healthcare needs.

Even if you did go to the doctor, he’d write out a prescription, and the instructions he generally gave you were to take the script to the apothecary and have the chap behind the counter make up the medicine for you, which the apothecary would’ve done anyway, even if you hadn’t gone to the doctor. And that’s the key difference between a Victorian pharmacist, and one which trades and deals today: Victorian pharmacists and apothecaries MADE their drugs, whereas modern pharmacists just sell them.

Let’s make some drugs… 

Back in Victorian times, there was no such thing as off-the-shelf medicine. Every tablet, pill, suppository, ointment, potion, lotion, tincture and syrup to treat everything from a sore throat to fever, headaches to constipation, was made laboriously by hand, by the pharmacist. There was no such thing 150 years ago, of medicine-making factories like what we have today.

“So where’d they get their drugs from, then?” I hear you ask.

Well, what used to happen was that pharmacists would draw on the centuries of accumulated knowledge passed down from master to apprentice, over countless generations. This knowledge foretold of which plants, herbs, roots, leaves, barks, piths, saps, syrups, foodstuffs and various animal parts, had healing properties. It was knowing how to find these ingredients, how to identify them, how to use them and what they did, that was the biggest part of being a pharmacist or apothecary back in the Victorian era. Indeed, a lot of ancient and past medicine had far less to do with pills and potions, and more to do with herbs, roots, leaves and saps. A lot of the medicine was plant-based (it still is, we just don’t realise it, that’s all!), and because of this, a pharmacist 150 years ago did not have packets and jars and bottles of medicine – he would’ve had jars, and jars, and jars, and row after row after row of drawers, all filled with these plant extracts and component-parts.

Old apothecary shops were famous for having dozens, hundreds of jars, bottles and drawers, all filled with plant and animal components, all of which were used for treating illnesses. Stuff like willow-bark, opium, cannabis, cocaine, smelling-salts, essential oils, cold-creams, arsenic, cyanide, moisturizers, lip-balms and all other manner of countless ingredients!

What used to happen is that you’d go into your apothecary, and he would diagnose you, and then recommend a treatment based on that diagnosis, or based on the symptoms which you told him of. After making his diagnosis or recommended course of treatment, the apothecary would then make the medicine for you – on the spot, there and then. This might take a few minutes, it might take hours! You might be told to come back later to pick it up, or you might just take a seat in the corner and read the newspaper in the meantime.

Victorian-era Medicine

Medicine for most of the Victorian-era varied little from medicine in previous centuries. All medicinal plant-and-herb components were bought, sold, and used in their raw form. No aspirin – just willowbark. No sleeping-pills – just opium. No laxatives, just rhubarb!

So what happened when you had to take your medicine?

Well, to make it easier to digest, and to make the active components easier to absorb, the plant material had to be broken down. This was most often accomplished by grinding, crushing, pounding and muddling, using an apothecary’s mortar and pestle, like this one:

A lathe-spun Victorian apothecary’s mortar and pestle, made of brass to make it easier to clean, more resilient to constant daily use, and to prevent medicine or poison from absorbing into the body of the mortar (which might cause poisoning!) This one’s from my personal collection of antique brassware.

Once the medicine had been crushed, ground and pulverised into dust, it could then be either dispensed into a jar, wrapped up in sachets, sealed inside capsules, or mixed with syrup in order to form a paste, which could then be rolled, or pressed into pills or tablets. As tablets were tricky to make by hand, some medicines were simply sold as the powder they ended up as – put inside a folded piece of paper and put inside a box along with a whole heap of others. One folded piece of paper meant one dose. The medicine was unfolded, tipped into a glass of water or other convenient beverage, and then consumed. It’s the origin of the expression ‘to take a powder‘. My dad remembers having to do this when he was a child for things like painkillers when he had a fever or headache – he said it always tasted horrible!

The Victorian Pill-Roller – How Does it Work?

Hard tablets were tricky to make. The powder had to be poured into a mold, the mold was closed and then hammered to compress the powder. The mold was broken open and a single tablet would drop out. This was slow, fiddly, and imprecise. Making pills on the other hand, which didn’t require this fiddly process, was much easier. And that’s where my Victorian pill-roller comes in.

Once the necessary ingredients for the pills had been measured, crushed, ground and pulverised, a final ingredient was poured into the mortar – syrup. The syrup wasn’t there to sweeten the mixture, it was there to act as a binding-agent. You mixed the syrup into the powder until the entire thing coagulated into a paste or doughy mixture. Then you could scoop out the entire mass, and roll it into a snake or sausage – one long, continuous worm of medicine!

Obviously, nobody wants to take an entire worm of medicine, no matter how sick they are. So to make it easier, the whole mass had to be cut up and shaped into pills.

This used to be done by hand. And there’s nothing wrong with that, except that no two pills were then ever exactly alike – which could be dangerous if the medicine was exceptionally potent!

To even the odds, and to make pills more uniform, the pill-roller was invented, around the 1850s.

So, how does it work?

Well it’s very simple. It has two parts (well three, but the third one is missing – I’ll get to that later on).

The largest piece is the board. This is set at an angle and is comprised of the rolling surface, the cutting grooves, and the collection-tray. The large flat surface is for rolling out the pill-paste into the sausage that I mentioned earlier. This is then rolled towards the brass cutting-grooves. The paddle (the second piece) is flipped over so that the grooves there line up with the grooves on the board.

Rollers on the ends of the paddle roll against the brass edges of the board, and they guide the paddle straight across the grooves, taking the pill-mass with it. The grooves on the paddle and the board slice up the pill-mass and, after rolling the thing back and forth a couple of times like a rolling-pin, the circular pills – each one exactly the same size now (wow!) – roll off the grooves and into the tray at the bottom. And there you have it – two dozen pills all done in less than a minute! Talk about mass production, huh? This process could be repeated countless times and the results would always be the same – perfectly shaped pills, which were all the right size, and the right dosage.

Now, remember I said that the board was on an angle? That’s to ensure that the pills only roll one way – across the grooves from one end, to the other, turning from lumps of clumpiness on one end, to emerge as recognisable pills on the other. Now this presents a problem: Pills are round. And if you studied university-grade physics like I didn’t, then you might or might not know that round things on a sloping surface…roll. A simple application of gravity overcoming friction.

To prevent your newly-formed pills from rolling off the board, onto the table, and then all over the floor, the pill-roller came with a third component, which on this one, is missing – a removable, wooden collection-drawer. At the end of a session of rolling, the pills would land inside the drawer and remain there while you made more. When the drawer was full, you could slide it out and empty its contents into a jar or bottle, easily, and cleanly.

That said, simply rolling the pills wasn’t always sufficient. To improve their look, or to change their shape, each pill was then placed inside a highly sophisticated pill-rounding device, which is different from a pill-rolling device, in that it doesn’t roll the pills, it rounds them.

What’s the difference? One device makes the pills, the other one pretties them up for the camera.

The pill-rounder is basically a flat wooden disc or cup. You stick it over the pill (one pill at a time) and slide it back and forth and all around. This rolls the pill inside all over the place, smoothing out any lumps and bumps, so that it’s a perfect sphere. Shaking the rounder back and forth flattens out the sides so that it looks more oval than circular – one trick to differentiate pills from each other if they’re the same size or colour, but have different functions – was to make different pills a different shape. You don’t want to confuse a laxative with a sleeping-tablet…

Restoring the Pill-Roller

Anyway, so much for the pill-roller and how it works. What about fixing it up?

Well, this is what it looked like when I bought it…

As you can see, worn out, and rather dry. The wood was supposed to be a beautiful dark mahogany colour and the brass is supposed to be a gleaming gold…instead both elements look rather dusty. In that photograph it’s almost impossible to tell them apart! It took a lot of polishing with Brasso and ultrafine steel-wool to restore the brass back to its previous luster…

The brass grooves and rails after my first concentrated polishing effort. It would take a lot more to finish it off.

Apart from polishing and cleaning the brass, I also had to tighten screws, fix dents in the brass rails (which fortunately were few and easily remedied), and clean out the grit and dust stuck inside the cracks.

The biggest repair I had to do was to rebuild the one missing piece from this device: The pill-collection drawer. This involved a lot of careful measuring, tracing, cutting, and research.

Rebuilding the Drawer!

I didn’t know that this thing was missing something when I bought it. I was so excited at the possibility of owning it that this had never crossed my mind! It was only after I’d started researching it, that I’d realised that something was missing. In researching the history of these things and trying to dig out photos of them online, I started to realise that mine was incomplete. Fortunately, rebuilding the drawer looked like a relative cakewalk, so I headed out, purchased the necessary materials, and started.

The first step was to measure and mark all the pieces that I’d need, after looking at loads of photos to determine the general style and shape of the thing. The next step was to cut them out and figure out how they’d all fit together. Due to the shape of the board and the grooves which the drawer had to slide in, each piece had to be carefully sanded, chiseled, cut, measured and oriented a specific way, otherwise it wouldn’t work.

Sanding and chiseling took up the most time. The first and easiest step was to measure, cut and sand the baseboard for the drawer. This had to fit perfectly, because everything else would be measured and cut in relation to how it moved inside the pill-roller. Once its size was perfected and it could slide in and out comfortably, I started on the side-pieces. These were harder because to fit inside the drawer-space, they actually needed quite a lot of wood taken off. I accomplished this with a ruler, pencil, hammer and chisel to carefully score, chip and split off as much wood as I needed, before sanding the chiseled area smooth.

The next step was to cut the curved, quarter-circle rails that would be at either end of the drawer. One end had to be lower than the other, so that the pills would roll into the drawer easily. The other end had to be higher, so that the pills wouldn’t then be encouraged to roll out the other side! The challenge here was to cut and sand these rails to the right length. Too short and they’d fall out and be the wrong size. Too long and if I forced them between the sides of the drawer, I risked splitting the pill-rolling board in half – which would be a disaster!

The next step was to fit all the pieces together, and ensure that they would slide in and out smoothly, without jamming…

All the pieces fitted together, before final assembly.

Once I was satisfied with how they fit together, I started gluing them together. This was the easiest bit. I started with the end-stop rail first, then the rail closest to the pill-grooves. And then I glued the side-panels onto the sides of the rails and the top of the baseboard. Then I slid the whole thing into the drawer-space to compress it a bit while the glue dried. This was the result:

Drawer goes in…

…drawer comes out!

I had to be very careful with these last few steps. The drawer had to be just the right size. If it was even a fraction too small, then it would just fall out. If it was a fraction too big, then it would jam, and quite possibly damage the board. But patience paid off and the results speak for themselves. The final step was to nail the pieces together here and there, just to provide some extra strength and peace of mind, and then to stain everything with oil to bring out the grain and colour, but the project was essentially finished at this point – all the other things that still had to be done were purely cosmetic. The main ‘reconstructive surgery’ as it were, was now completed.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

And there you have it. The finished product. Next comes staining, and perhaps a demonstration of how this thing actually operates, but that’ll be for another posting! Stay tuned!