Peglar papers reading workshop

Explore one of the most intriguing documents connected to the lost John Franklin expedition.

The ‘Peglar wallet’ (ACG/36) is a document linked to the John Franklin expedition, which set off to discover the Northwest passage in 1845 and was lost sometime in 1849. 

It contains papers related to Henry Peter Peglar (1811-?), who was Captain on the foretop of the HMS Terror, one of the two ships that supported the expedition. 

Recent DNA analysis has identified Peglar's remains, along with those of other sailors from the expedition, through matches with living descendants.

A document full of gaps, puzzles and creativity

The papers are documents with significant gaps, with large chunks of text literally missing from the page.

They are also creative. They contain:

•  a poem
• an account of Peglar's career written in the shape of a square labyrinth
• and various accounts of his life written backwards, which have sometimes being interpreted as written by a second hand.

The Peglar papers conceal and reveal at the same time. 

They give no discernible information about the fate of the Franklin expedition but reveal the personality of their author.

Read the Papers together

In this reading workshop, we will read the Papers together, working on high resolution scans and producing a collective transcription. 

While transcriptions of the papers already exist, a collective reading will certainly reveal new and interesting insights.

We will read the Papers in order of difficulty: from the most legible and most complete to the least legible and most complex. And we will compare them with contemporary manuscript sources and reading against the grain of existing scholarship.

A queer methodology

An elusive document like this is best read with a queer methodology. Queerness in this case means 

• interdisciplinarity
• reading between the lines
• playfulness 
• even flirtiness. 

Engaging with Matthew Daniel Eddy's concept of note-taking as a technology, we will also explore the Peglar papers as a device with which their author made sense of the world. 

Rather than trying to extract knowledge about the Franklin expedition, we will look at the papers foremost as a piece of art and as a creative endeavour, in solidarity with their author. 

At the end of the workshop, we will have gained confidence in reading difficult manuscript sources, and engaged with polar history in a way that enriches our relation with sources.

Meet the workshop leader: Ema Sala

The workshops will be led by Ema Sala (they/them).

Ema is a Caird Fellow at the Royal Museums Greenwich, where they research Female sailors, people assigned female at birth who sailed as men in the 18th and 19th century. 

Ema is the coordinator of Queer History Club, a community-led research group that has been active at the museum since 2023, and has worked on events like Pirates Late and the Being Human festival in November 2025. 

Their research interests are 

• trans and working-class history
• masculinities
• fashion
• the embodied experience of being a sailor. 

In Spring 2025, they led an initial reading group session on the Peglar papers. Their blog about Female sailors can be found here. They also have a blog about the Peglar papers here.