Franklin’s lost expedition

Found in 2014 and 2016 by finally listening to Inuit oral testimony

Captain Sir John Franklin left England in 1845 with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror and 129 officers and men, to sail the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage and record magnetic data on the way. Both ships carried steam engines converted from London & Croydon Railway locomotives. A whaling ship last saw them in July 1845. They became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island, in what is now Nunavut, and after more than a year in the ice they were abandoned in April 1848, by which point two dozen men, Franklin among them, had died. Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames led the survivors south toward the mainland, and none of them came back.

Pressed by Franklin's wife, Jane, the Admiralty began searching in 1848, and searches went on for decades. They found relics and the remains of two men, and in 1854 John Rae reported allegations of cannibalism; cut marks on bones recovered in modern studies support them. Hypothermia, starvation, lead poisoning or zinc deficiency, scurvy and exposure killed every man, the worst disaster in the Royal Navy's long history of polar exploration. Roald Amundsen finally took a boat through the Northwest Passage in 1906, in the Gjøa.

The ships stayed lost until 2014, when a search team led by Parks Canada found Erebus in the eastern part of Queen Maud Gulf. In 2016 the Arctic Research Foundation found Terror in pristine condition in Terror Bay, south of King William Island, after a tip from an Inuk crewman, Sammy Kogvik of Gjoa Haven. Both sank far south of where they were abandoned, raising the possibility that some of the crew re-manned a ship and sailed on. The modern search was launched by Prime Minister Stephen Harper as part of a push to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic, with Parks Canada archaeologists leading it from 2008, and divers have raised the bell from Franklin's flagship, a cannon and a ceramic plate.

The two wrecks are now protected together as the Wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site, and research and dive expeditions go out to them every year.