Don's Blog The Mystery of the Franklin Expedition

As we exited the Bellot Strait we turned south into the Franklin Trough between Peel Sound and The Franklin Strait. Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin left England in May of 1845 with 24 officers and 110 men in 2 ships, the Erebus and the Terror. After the winter on Beechey Island the force sailed south most probably through Peel Sound which is just north of our position and disappeared. 

Sir John Franklin

The Erebus (Franklin) and the Terror (Crozier)

From Peel Sound Franklin's two ships would have sailed south through the Franklin Strait and then Larsen Sound toward King William Island. At this point Franklin made his fatal mistake. Instead of sailing southeast through what is now the James Ross Strait to the Rasmussen Basin, his force went southwest through the Victoria Strait. Later findings showed that the Erebus and the Terror became trapped in the icealong the northwest shore of King William Island in September of 1846.

Franklin's expedition was held by the British public as we would have held two teams of astronauts on two space ships. After no word  for three years a massive search for the missing party was begun. There were eleven British and 2 American search parties.  Independently in 1854 Scottish explorer Dr. John Rae while surveying the Boothia Peninsula on foot for the Hudson Bay Company discovered by talking to Inuit hunters that both of Franklin's ships had become icebound and the survivors had tried to reach safety on foot but had succumbed to the cold and starvation. The Inuit were in possession of artifacts from the Franklin party providing physical proof. Further, in 1859 one of the ships under Francis Leopold McClintock found a note in a cairn at  Victory Point on the northwestern shore of King William Island which reported that Sir John Franklin had died in 1847. Over the next four decades there were more than 25 more search expeditions. Artifacts and skulls and other bones have been found through the years indicating that the men had died. Yet the details of what finally happened to the officers and crew have remained unanswered.

The exciting news is that recently  after 169 years both submerged ships have been discovered. The Erebus was located in fairly shallow water near an island in the Queen Maude Gulf off the Adelaide Peninsula in 2014 by a  Parks Canada team. The Terror was found in King William Island's Terror Bay in 2016 by the Arctic Research Foundation, a private group.  The underwater archeologists are working slowly to unravel what is there and the mystery continues.