The shrewd old father, with that acute knowledge of the short-lived enthusiasms of youth, put him to test, and at fourteen years of age young John served on a merchantman bound for Lisbon. Undaunted by the hard berth of a sailor lad, we find him in 1801 on the quarter-deck of the Polephemus, under Captain Lanford, leading in line at the battle of Copenhagen, Lord Nelson’s hardest fought battle.
His iron will, ever more firm in its determination for a life of adventure, secured him later a berth in the discovery ship Investigator, exploring the coast of Australia, where Franklin acquired valuable astronomical and surveying skill under his able relative, Captain Flinders.
Transferred to the Porpoise, which, in company with the Cato, was wrecked on a coral reef off the coast of Australia, August 18, 1803, the lad, with one hundred and fifty others, spent fifty days on a strip of sand only four feet above water. Captain Flinders, after making his way 250 leagues to Port Jackson in an open boat, rescued his companions. Franklin finally reached Canton, where he secured passage to England in the Earl Camden, East-Indiaman, under Sir Nathaniel Dance, commodore of the China fleet.
An engagement with the French squadron occurred in February, 1804, at which young Franklin rendered valuable service as signal midshipman. On his return to England he was assigned to the Bellerophon. At the battle of Trafalgar, he gallantly stood on the poop, with the dead and dying falling beside him, attending to the signals, with a coolness and accuracy that won him the unstinted admiration of his comrades.
For the next two years he served under Admirals Cornwallis, St. Vincent, and Stratham; then for six years in the Bedford.
In the disastrous attack upon New Orleans, Franklin commanded the boats in a fight with the enemy’s gunboats; he captured one of them and suffered a slight wound in the shoulder in a hand-to-hand encounter.
John Franklin
He was promoted to first lieutenant for gallant service and assigned to the Forth, which, after the abdication of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons, conveyed the Duchess d’Angouleme back to France.
SIR JOHN FRANKLIN