Unauthorized use is prohibited.įranklin was given command of two state-of-the-art ships, Erebus and Terror, both equipped with stout, iron-sheathed hulls and steam engines, as well as the finest scientific equipment and enough food and supplies for three years in the high Arctic. ( Here's the mysterious clue that led to the discovery of the H.M.S. Working swiftly in the frigid water, divers inserted miniature ROVs through openings in the main hatchway and skylights in the crew’s cabins, officers’ mess, and captain’s stateroom. Taking advantage of unusually calm seas and good underwater visibility, a team from Parks Canada, in partnership with Inuit, earlier this month made a series of seven dives on the fabled wreck. You just don’t see this kind of thing very often.”ĭiscovered in 2016 in icy waters off King William Island in Canada’s far north, the shipwreck hadn’t been thoroughly studied until now. “You look at it and find it hard to believe this is a 170-year-old shipwreck. “The ship is amazingly intact,” says Ryan Harris, the lead archaeologist on the project. Terror, one of the long lost ships from Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, is astonishingly well preserved, say Parks Canada archaeologists, who recently used small remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) to peer deep inside the historic vessel’s interior. But after more than a week of scouring the landscape for signs of Franklin's tomb, the crew were forced to abandon their search.The wreck of H.M.S. There, the explorers discovered various artifacts, including a tent peg, that suggested they were getting close. According to Inuit accounts, Franklin's tomb is located there, while a note found on the island indicates he died aboard HMS Erebus on June 11, 1847. Synnott and a team of explorers and filmmakers followed the expedition's route through the Canadian Arctic, sailing through fog and storms until they reached King William Island. Cracked bones discovered at Booth Point and Erebus Bay indicate crew members likely sucked out the marrow from their dead comrades' bones to extract every last bit of nutrition they could. The sailors who abandoned their ships may have resorted to cannibalism to survive in the frigid expanse. (Image credit: Courtesy of National Geographic/Renan Ozturk) Others think the sailors died of tuberculosis, respiratory illness and cardiovascular disease, based on records that were kept in "sick books" on ships that were sent in search of survivors.Ī member of the crew stands on a chunk of ice in Pasley Bay, Nunavut, close to where Franklin's expedition became trapped. The crew may have succumbed to a combination of starvation, scurvy - a disease caused by a serious vitamin C deficiency - and lead poisoning from eating poorly canned foods, some experts have posited. But in the end "we know they all died," Synnott said. Research also revealed that some of the crew died on the ice-locked ships, but 105 men survived on supplies they'd brought with them and abandoned the wrecks in April 1848. Two years later, a tip from a local Inuit fisher led to the discovery of the HMS Erebus off the coast of King William Island. In 2014, a Canadian search team found one of the lost ships, the HMS Terror, in Victoria Strait. Modern-day searches have shed some light on what happened to Franklin's ill-fated expedition. The new expedition set sail aboard the Polar Sun to find Sir John Franklin's tomb.
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