Australian connections
Apart from Sir John Franklin himself, who was a former Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, the crew included two people with close family connections to explorers of Australia who also died tragically. Cmdr Henry Le Vesconte was the first cousin of William John Wills, the co-leader of the 1861 Burke and Wills expedition, the first to cross the Australian mainland from south to north; both Burke and Wills perished on the return journey. William Gibson, a steward on HMS Terror, was the elder brother of Alfred Gibson, who disappeared on an 1874 expedition led by Ernest Giles to cross the deserts of Western Australia from east to west, and was honoured in the naming of the Gibson Desert. From Giles’ journal entry of 21 April 1873:
I remarked to Gibson as we rode along that this was the anniversary of Burke’s and Wills’s return to their depot at Coopers’ Creek and then recited to him, as he did not appear to know anything whatever about it, the hardships they endured, their desperate struggles for existence and death there; and casually remarked that Mr Wills had a brother who also lost his life in the field of discovery, as he went out with Sir John Franklin in 1845. Gibson then remarked, “Oh, I had a brother who died with Franklin at the North Pole and my father had a great deal of trouble getting his pay from Government”.