![]() (Cut marks on bones discovered on King William Island may bear out native stories.) Some Inuit legends - dismissed by nonnative searchers - even pinpointed the spot where Terror eventually was found in remarkable condition in about 80 feet of water. Inuit legends include tales of men staggering over the ice, their faces blackened by scurvy, reduced to eating their fallen companions. Within a year and a half, Sir John Franklin was dead and both ships were stuck fast.Īfter a two-year siege, it’s believed that both crews abandoned their ships - still full of nearly three years’ worth of canned goods that may or may not have prematurely spoiled - and set out to walk hundreds of miles across the Arctic to the Canadian mainland. Two 100-foot military ships, reinforced with iron and crewed by men and officers experienced in the Arctic, set out to find the fabled northern sea route from Europe to Asia. But why? And by whom?įinding Franklin and Paul Watson’s Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition (Norton, 2017) set out to shed light on a mystery that was the Amelia Earhart legend of its day. Some researchers now believe either or both ships were remanned and sailed south. “Franklin fever” drove the Royal British navy to keep looking for the ships for decades Canada’s national park service took up the search, along with Inuit and private partners, in 2008.Ĭall it the rare upside of climate change: Diminishing ice helped Canada’s efforts pay off in 2014, when Erebus was found, and again this past fall when Terror was located, in Queen Maud Gulf - 60 miles from the Victoria Strait, where scant historical records suggested the ships should be. Potter, author of Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016). “I’ve come to think of it as almost a kind of virus,” says Russell A. ![]() For nearly 170 years, tales of Terror and Erebus - ships of the 1845 Franklin Expedition seeking the Northwest Passage - have fascinated seamen and history buffs. ![]() And more than 100 men who simply vanished.
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