Lord Franklin.

This is another story with a song . It is taken from Arcanadh's album Soundings. It tells the story of the ill-fated Lord Franklin.

Lord Franklin.

Lord Franklin was a famous nineteenth century British sea captain and explorer.  His final expedition, undertaken in his sixties, aimed to find the (at the time) mythical Northwest sea Passage.  The expedition set off for the artic in 1846 .  At the time, it was quite usual for such expeditions to be out of contact for more than a year, so at first nobody worried too much about Franklin.  Then, as the months wore on, it became clear that the expedition had met with some mishap. 

The fate of Franklin was a public mystery ("The fate of Franklin, no man may know"). The icebound ships were abandoned and the entire crew perished from starvation, hypothermia, tuberculosis, lead poisoning and scurvy. Franklin's wife ultimately commissioned a second expedition to search for her husband, even though by the time it left, it was all but certain that Franklin himself had perished. 

It is this story that the song tells, apparently from the point of view of Lady Franklin.  Indeed, according to some sources, she was the song's author.