Trip beneath the Arctic ice offers portal to a tragic past
QUEEN MAUD GULF, NUNAVUT— The ice hole that leads to the watery grave of Sir John Franklin’s flagship is like a shimmering window, looking back in time.
Peering over the edge of a triangle cut through turquoise sea ice, you can see the port side of HMS Erebus, her wooden hull encrusted with mussels, sponges and other sea life. She’s standing tall on the seabed.
The upper deck, where the last sailor surrendered the ship to the Arctic in the mid-19th century, lies just four metres beneath the surface. The sea floor is roughly the same distance from the ship’s deck. Her bow points west, toward the exit of the Northwest Passage, which 129 men died trying to find in the late 1840s.
Both the Erebus and HMS Terror were trapped in sea ice northwest of King William Island and abandoned in 1848. Scores of survivors headed south, hoping to reach safety. All perished.
It was the worst disaster in the history of Royal Navy Arctic exploration. Now Parks Canada marine archeologists hope to coax clues from the mystery of the Erebus wreck.
In the final hours of this phase of the exploration, which ended Saturday night, the mission focused on several artifacts, including a table leg and a cannon.
Divers struggled against currents to get accurate readings from a measuring tape and a fold-up white ruler. They scribbled data on a slate with a pencil attached by surgical tubing, before deciding whether to raise anything to the surface.
Being so close to the wreck is a reminder of the horrors her crew suffered. The seamen went slowly mad as tins of food tainted with lead and botulism ran out, scurvy and frostbite set in, and their bodies submitted to the punishing High Arctic.
“When you’re physically beside the wreck, you can appreciate the scale of it differently,” said Ryan Harris, a senior underwater archeologist with Parks Canada.
“On the outside, you can look up and see: ‘Wow. This is a large, stately shipwreck standing bolt upright on the sea floor.’
“Back in September, when you were poking your head inside, it was almost just the opposite: ‘How could 66 men share this space for four or five years?’ They must have been just crawling over one another.
“They would have experienced long, harrowing winter months — winds howling outside, perpetual darkness through winter. And just chock-a-block full of sailors, hunkered down in their perspiration and condensation. It must have been a difficult, difficult time.”
The dive operation was cut short by bad weather and planners had to drop 11 Royal Canadian Navy divers from the mission. That left 23 divers in a camp of 28 people, said navy Lt. Greg Oikle.
Eight of the divers were Parks Canada marine archeologists, accompanied by a conservator who was ready to preserve artifacts raised from the wreck.
There were two triangular dive holes, cut with a special drill through ice some two metres thick. Only one of those holes was used; a tent over the second one became a change room and storage site.
An orange plastic tent stake hammered into the ice on April 9 marks the spot above Erebus, pinpointed with a GPS satellite reading, where her main mast once towered over the ship. The camp was built around it, Oikle said.
I flew into the remote ice camp, thundering across the High Arctic at a few hundred feet, on a Royal Canadian Air Force CH-149 Cormorant.
The bright yellow chopper’s call sign is Snake 909, part of 442 Transport and Rescue Squadron, based in Comox, B.C.
Without a hangar to keep the aircraft warm at night, Capt. Blair Turner, 37, of Dartmouth, N.S., and Capt. Jarrett Feist, 42, of Marston, Sask., have to warm the sophisticated avionics and other gear slowly each day.
The $30-million helicopter is loaded with rescue and survival gear, including a snow knife in case the crew must build an igloo or dig a snow cave in the event of a forced landing.
“Fate favours the prepared,” Master Cpl. Tyler Salmond said over the chopper’s intercom as we approached the ice camp.
Archeologists were paired with navy divers. The Parks Canada team trained their navy partners in basic archeology and the unique demands of swimming around a shipwreck, always aware that even air bubbles or a kick of the flippers could cause damage.
They work in shifts, putting in 14-hour days. Wearing triple-layered dry suits against seas chilled to around -1 C, they are pressed to check off as many tasks as possible from their lists before leaving Erebus once more.
“If you’re in there for several hours, it sort of saps your strength day after day,” Harris said. “So we’re taking advantage of the bodies we have to get the most out of the dives and hours each day.”
It’s now much darker under the ice than when the divers discovered Erebus last September.
But the ice cover helps calm the waters, keeping them remarkably clear, especially compared to the murk of last fall, when the archeologists undertook a short series of dives after a three-day gale.
This time they spent hours carefully shearing a thick kelp bed from Erebus’s port side, one frond at a time.
The pruning revealed the port side and distinct lines of Erebus’s bow and stern, including details of her hull such as rivets left after dockyard workers in Britain removed copper sheeting in order to speed the ship’s voyage.
Divers can clearly see two large Xs on the bow, Roman numerals marking the 20-foot draft mark above her keel.
Iron sheet plating covers the lower half of the draft mark.
Workers clad the bows of Erebus and HMS Terror with iron plate to help shield them from the crushing force of sea ice.
Divers have also seen “prominent ice shelves, which stretch all around the perimeter of the ship, and these were to fend off ice-push from tearing out the shrouds, which anchored the masts,” Harris said.
“We can see the iron stains from where the chain plates that held each shroud — the deadeyes — where those collapsed, after the ice carried away the masts shortly after the ship sank.”
An intriguing find is the stern track, an innovation of the age, which allowed Franklin’s sailors to deploy a propeller screw powered by a coal-fired steam engine to cut through ice leads.
“We don’t see a propeller right there, so we don’t know exactly what the situation was when the ship was abandoned,” Harris said.
The stern, home to Franklin’s commander’s cabin, is open for view. It’s the most damaged part of the ship, where the pressure of ice apparently took a large bite out of Erebus.
Petty Officer First Class Yves Bernard, a navy diver, spent two tough summers hunting for Erebus and Terror aboard RV Martin Bergmann, a converted Newfoundland fishing trawler. The vessel is owned by the Arctic Research Foundation, founded by Jim Balsillie, former CEO of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.
The Bergmann covered by far the most territory in the arduous quest.
She got close to Erebus’s resting place. But fate would have someone else find the final clue that led to her discovery, near a small island in eastern Queen Maud Gulf.
When the ice dive began this month, Bernard, 36, of Sept-Iles, Que., was first down on Erebus, becoming the first navy sailor to touch her since the last one climbed down some 165 years ago, with a prayer that he might live to tell the sailors’ horrifying story.
Bernard and other divers are trying to tell the saga for them.
“It’s quite the honour. It’s harsh to do it, but it was all the harder for them. If it’s cold for us, how cold could it have been for them?” he wondered aloud.
“This brings it full circle.”