Had you been alive in 1825, and had you chosen to make the short trip over to the East Branch of the Holland River, you might have witnessed a bit of history unfold. It was in that year, and at that spot, that explorer Sir John Franklin began an overland voyage of discovery to chart parts of Canada’s Arctic coastline.
Finding the near-legendary Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean was a lifelong obsession for Franklin, an obsession that eventually led to his demise. But that was years away and far from Franklin’s mind when he set out on a second expedition in 1825.
Franklin was born in 1786 and entered the Royal Navy at age 14. A natural explorer, he served under his cousin, Matthew Flinders, on a coastal survey of Australia from 1801 to 1803 and was second in command of an Arctic cruise in 1818.
During a first journey into Canada’s North from 1818 to 1821, Franklin’s party had surveyed the western shores of Hudson’s Bay. When it came time to plan a second exploration of the North in 1825, Franklin employed canoes and bateaux (large rowboats 45 feet in length) as his mode of transportation. This decision allowed him to move faster and to carry more supplies than if he had walked and clearly extended his range of exploration.
The journey began in April with the party disembarking from ships in New York City. After travelling overland to Niagara, Franklin’s party took a boat across to York (now Toronto), “where we were kindly received by the Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland.”
From here, Franklin, more or less, followed a route that had been used by First Nations for millennia, and by fur traders after them.
Not dallying long in York, they headed up Yonge Street, then the only real route north. They spent a few days in Newmarket, then a bustling fur-trade community that, for the expedition, represented a final taste of civilization before facing the rigours of months travelling through inhospitable territory.
Here, Franklin enjoyed the hospitality of the community’s leading figure, Peter Robinson. Robinson was well known to Bradford residents. In addition to being active in the fur trade, he owned a grist mill in Holland Landing, where Bradford farmers had their grain ground into flour, a distillery there where whiskey could be had, and played a hand in surveying Bradford and West Gwillimbury.
The next morning, the party pushed on. They put their boats into the water of the East Branch of the Holland River. Franklin even then was a bit of a celebrity, so it’s likely people gathered to send him off. The party paddled out onto Lake Simcoe and headed for the Nine Mile Portage at Barrie, which would carry them overland to the Nottawasaga River and, hence, to Lake Huron at Wasaga Beach.
Franklin’s second Arctic expedition proved to be even more successful than the first. He and his men surveyed more than 2,000 kilometres of northwestern North America’s coastline from the Mackenzie River to Point Beechey in Alaska. In so doing, he proved the existence of the Northwest Passage. For his achievement, he was knighted.
And it all began here, in our region.
