By: Daniel Nardini
A survey and research team from the University of Victoria in Canada will be looking for the remains of two ships that were part of the Franklin Expedition. The team hopes to find more traces of this doomed expedition so that we know what happened to the ships and some of the crew. The main search will be for the two ships of the expedition—the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. I should provide some background information on the doomed Franklin Expedition. In 1845, the British government sent out an official expedition looking for the Northwest Passage among the Canadian Arctic islands leading from Greenland to northeast Asia. The man picked for this expedition was Sir John Franklin, an experienced naval officer who had led three expeditions through the Canadian Northwest Passage before.
This expedition was to have been Franklin’s fourth and last voyage through the Arctic. At the time, Franklin was 59 and due for retirement. He led a crew of 130 men. The expedition was in trouble from the start. Both ships were caught in ice and could not be freed. From that point, the crew had to abandon both ships and proceed on foot. They took what provisions they could and headed south in the hope of being rescued. They never were. One by one they died as the arctic weather grew worse, and some of the crew were buried in hastily dug graves. All subsequent rescue expeditions looking for any survivors proved unsuccessful—none of the Franklin crew survived. What happened to them all had been a mystery until recently. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, archeologists and researchers exhumed those graves of the crew that were found to learn what they died from. Since those of the Franklin crew buried were buried in permafrost, their bodies were pretty well preserved.
An examination of their skin tissue and blood revealed that the primary cause of death was pneumonia. However, a secondary cause of death was lead poisoning. It has been theorized that the lead poisoning came from either badly soldered food cans or from the ship’s drinking water container. Since the crew suffered from lead poisoning as well as from the cold, it has been theorized that they could not think clearly and thus their better judgement for what to do was clearly impaired. Later expeditions searching for the camp sites believed to have been set up by those surviving crews of the Franklin Expedition yielded bones with cut marks on them. This meant that the surviving crew were eating the bodies of those who had died. We may never know what happened to the last of those who died, including the captain Sir John Franklin. The expedition hopes to find the ships, which sank a long time ago. The University of Victoria expedition has sonar to track what wreckage there is below the waters in the Canadian Northwest Passage. Even now this area remains treacherous as many ships up to the modern era have sunk in those waters due to the ice.
Searching for the Franklin Expedition
By: Daniel Nardini
This expedition was to have been Franklin’s fourth and last voyage through the Arctic. At the time, Franklin was 59 and due for retirement. He led a crew of 130 men. The expedition was in trouble from the start. Both ships were caught in ice and could not be freed. From that point, the crew had to abandon both ships and proceed on foot. They took what provisions they could and headed south in the hope of being rescued. They never were. One by one they died as the arctic weather grew worse, and some of the crew were buried in hastily dug graves. All subsequent rescue expeditions looking for any survivors proved unsuccessful—none of the Franklin crew survived. What happened to them all had been a mystery until recently. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, archeologists and researchers exhumed those graves of the crew that were found to learn what they died from. Since those of the Franklin crew buried were buried in permafrost, their bodies were pretty well preserved.
An examination of their skin tissue and blood revealed that the primary cause of death was pneumonia. However, a secondary cause of death was lead poisoning. It has been theorized that the lead poisoning came from either badly soldered food cans or from the ship’s drinking water container. Since the crew suffered from lead poisoning as well as from the cold, it has been theorized that they could not think clearly and thus their better judgement for what to do was clearly impaired. Later expeditions searching for the camp sites believed to have been set up by those surviving crews of the Franklin Expedition yielded bones with cut marks on them. This meant that the surviving crew were eating the bodies of those who had died. We may never know what happened to the last of those who died, including the captain Sir John Franklin. The expedition hopes to find the ships, which sank a long time ago. The University of Victoria expedition has sonar to track what wreckage there is below the waters in the Canadian Northwest Passage. Even now this area remains treacherous as many ships up to the modern era have sunk in those waters due to the ice.