FATAL SHIP FOUND IN THE ARCTIC
The plates are still sitting on their shelves, and the windows of the captain’s cabin remain intact. For 170 years, historians had to assume what happened to Franklin’s lost expedition, but now, the last piece of the puzzle has been found.
Sir John Franklin was a legend in England. For about three decades, he had been challenging the icy waters between Britain and Canada, and in 1821, as a young sailor, Franklin obtained almost mythical status, when he survived a passage to Canada on a diet of woodlice and worn out leather boots.
However, hunger was not the adventurer’s problem, when he ordered his two ships, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus, and their combined crew of 129 men to leave Greenhithe, England, on 19 May 1845. The 59-year-old captain was overweight and not exactly the picture of a hard-working sailor. However, the crew believed in the heroic explorer and was convinced that Franklin would be able to find the fabled Northwest Passage north of Canada, opening a new sea route between Britain and Asia.
The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were the best equipped ships for Arctic exploration ever. Deep inside their hulls, complete steam engines had been installed to power the propellers. Moreover, the sterns had been reinforced with iron, so they could more easily break the ice, and huge boilers sent heat about the ships via networks of pipes. All of Europe held its breath in excitement, as Sir John Franklin and his crew left for the unknown, freezing cold waters.
If everything went according to plan, the Erebus and Terror would return to Britain three years later with a detailed description of the Northwest Passage. But it would take 170 years before a "white man" was to lay eyes on the ships again.
ROBOT DISCOVERS LEGENDARY SHIPWRECK
Parks Canada, which protects Canadian nature and history, was under immense pressure in the autumn of 2014, when yet another team was sent to look for Sir John Franklin’s lost ships. Six years of intense search of 800+ km2 of ocean floor at enormous cost had still not paid off, and the hope of unravelling one of the major mysteries in marine history seemed to dwindle.
So, everybody cheered on 1 October 2014, when marine archaeologists Ryan Harris and Marc-André Bernier reported that they had finally found one of Franklin’s ships, the HMS Erebus, on the ocean floor. The ship was identified by an ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle), which is a type
of underwater robot, and the scientists were able to retrieve the Erebus’ clock, and other artefacts.
“It is undoubtedly the most impressive shipwreck that I ever dived at,” said Marc-André Bernier following the groundbreaking discovery, whose exact position is still kept secret due to fear of looting.
FRANKLIN DIED EARLY
Parks Canada was not by far the first to try to locate the ships and find out what happened to Franklin’s lost expedition. In 1848-1854, Britain spent the 19th century equivalent of hundreds of millions of pounds to locate the naval hero and his two ships. More than 40 expeditions, of which the majority were English, were sent to unravel the mystery, but the first news about the fate of the expedition did not reach Britain until 1854, when investigator John Rae talked to a group of Inuit during his stay near Pelly Bay in Northern Canada.
The Inuit told Rae that four years previously, they had met a group of 40 sick and starving men with a dinghy and a couple of sledges.