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CANADA HAS LOCATED the remains of one of two British explorer ships lost in the Arctic in 1846, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced, hailing the find as historic.
The search for the ill-fated HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, headed by British explorer Sir John Franklin, involved six major expeditions since 2008 that scoured the seabed in the far-flung and frigid region.
Historic moment
Finally, on Sunday, a remotely operated underwater vehicle confirmed the discovery, Harper said in a statement.
“This is truly a historic moment for Canada,” Harper said.
Franklin’s ships are an important part of Canadian history given that his expeditions, which took place nearly 200 years ago, laid the foundations of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.
While enough information exists to confirm the authenticity of the find, it remains unclear which of the two doomed ships was actually detected.
Harper — saying one of Canada’s “greatest mysteries” has been solved — was optimistic that the second ship will now also be uncovered.
“Finding the first vessel will no doubt provide the momentum — or wind in our sails — necessary to locate its sister ship and find out even more about what happened to the Franklin Expedition’s crew.”
At the time, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were the jewels of the British Navy.
Under the command of Franklin and Captain Francis Crozier, the two vessels, with a combined crew of 134, left the shores of England on May 19, 1845, to discover the Northwest Passage that links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The last Europeans to have contact with the ships were crew members of two whaling boats that passed them in Baffin Bay in August 1845.
But as the explorers pushed into the Arctic archipelago, they soon ran into problems. And no one, aside from the occasional indigenous Inuit, ever saw them again alive.
Cold, hunger, cannibalism
The circumstances surrounding the fate of the Franklin Expedition didn’t become clearer until 1859, when a vessel chartered by Franklin’s widow, Lady Jane Franklin, came across a somber message on King William Island.
It turns out the sailors became trapped in ice for a year and half, and eventually ran out of supplies.
The message revealed that Franklin and 23 crew members died on June 11, 1847, in unspecified circumstances.
On April 22, 1848, 105 survivors left the ships in an attempt to reach solid ground on foot, but none of them survived.
In the 1980s, Canadian researchers said the remains of expedition members found on Beechey Island indicated they had died of cold, hunger and lead poisoning from canned food.
Bones discovered also showed signs of cannibalism. The two vessels were ultimately engulfed by ice.
The wreck was found in Victoria Strait off King William Island, not far from the Inuit village of Cambridge Bay.
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Great that they found this ship. Might help solve the mystery of what happened to this expedition. Read a book a few years ago about the Franklin Expedition and it was fascinating. There is still some mystery about what exactly happened. These guy were true pioneers.
I’m sure my great great great grandkids will be reading something similar, September 2184… MH17 found off the coast of Australia.
@cabe
They already found Mh17 it’s in the Ukraine in bits, Mh370 is still missing though. Wake wakey
Thank god for that.
I’ll sleep well tonight.
Always been fascinated by the resilience of the survivors. It will be interesting to learn how close they were to the Inuit settlement.
Cambridge Bay was only founded in the early 1920s. Inuit would have been in the area but migrated and moved with the hunting and fishing as and when needed. There were no permanent settlements. Regardless Franklin, his crews and the general sentiment of the time thought the Inuit to be nothing but savages with little or no knowledge of use. In fact when Rae came back from a rescue mission for Franklin and reported that the men had eaten each other to survive (info gathered from Inuit) he was ridiculed by many including Charles Dickens for believing savages. The distances up there, even now, are huge and it’s a lonely place to be lost.
Last month a Phoenician merchant vessel from 700 BC was found in the Mediterranean near Malta.
http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/science-phoenician-shipwreck-malta-02118.html
Crozier was an Irish chap, I believe?
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