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Sir John Franklin set out to traverse the Northwest Passage but became lost when the icepack closed around his ships. But has he been found?
A new study by University of Glasgow researchers may give further insight to the deaths of all 129 crew of the ill-fated "Franklin Expedition" of 1845 which was lost in the Canadian Arctic as it attempted to navigate the final link in the fabled Northwest Passage in HMS Erebus and Terror.
The fate of Capt. Sir John Franklin and crew has been a mystery for more than 160 years, but now Canadian archaeologists believe they've found one of the expedition's two main vessels.
Doomed 1845 ship believed to have been lost in the Arctic was found by Canada finally, after over 170 years of explorers’ searches. The doomed 1845 ship found by Canada is one of two British explorer...
Le navire, un trois-mâts, a disparu dans les eaux glaciales de l’Arctique canadien il y a 203 ans…
Intrepid voyager, writer and comedian Sir Michael Palin follows the trail of two expeditions made by the Royal Navy's HMS Erebus to opposite ends of the globe, reliving the voyages and investigating the ship itself, lost on the final Franklin expedition and discovered with the help of Inuit knowledge in 2014.The story of a ship begins after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, when Great Britain had more bomb ships than it had enemies. The solid, reinforced hulls of HMS Erebus, and another bomb ship, HMS Terror, made them suitable for discovering what lay at the coldest ends of the earth. In 1839, Erebus was chosen as the flagship of an expedition to penetrate south to explore Antarctica. Under the leadership of the charismatic James Clark Ross, she and HMS Terror sailed further south than anyone had been before. But Antarctica never captured the national imagination; what the British navy needed now was confirmation of its superiority by making the discovery, once and for all, of a route through the North-West Passage. Chosen to lead the mission was Sir John Franklin, at 59 someone many considered too old for such a hazardous journey. Nevertheless, he and his men confidently sailed away down the Thames in April 1845. Provisioned for three winters in the Arctic, Erebus and Terror and the 129 men of the Franklin expedition were seen heading west by two whalers in late July--never to return. Over the years there were many attempts to discover what might have happened--and eventually the first bodies were discovered in shallow graves, confirming that it had been the dreadful fate of the explorers to die of hunger and scurvy as they abandoned the ships in the ice. For generations, the mystery of what had happened to the ships endured. Then, on September 9th, 2014, came the almost unbelievable news: HMS Erebus had been discovered thirty feet below the Arctic waters, by a Parks Canada exploration ship. Palin looks at the Erebus story through the different motives of the two expeditions, one scientific and successful, the other nationalistic and disastrous. He examines the past by means of the extensive historical record and travels in the present day to those places where there is still an echo of Erebus herself, from the dockyard where she was built, to Tasmania where the Antarctic voyage began and the Falkland Islands, then on to the Canadian Arctic, to get a sense of what the conditions must have been like for the starving, stumbling sailors as they abandoned their ships to the ice. And of course the story has a future. It lies ten metres down in the waters of Nunavut's Queen Maud Gulf, where many secrets wait to be revealed.
After another season of searching in the cold waters off Nunavut, HMS Terror remains elusive, but new photos released today show some of the 39 artifacts recovered during the latest search of the HMS Erebus wreck site in Nunavut.
There are over three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor. Here are some of the best examples!
The doomed 1845 voyage of Sir John Franklin to the Northwest Arctic Passage was one of the greatest disasters of British polar history, ending in the deaths of 129 crewmen.
Brian Spenceley recalls the expedition when he first saw his great-great uncle
Parks Canada underwater archeologists planning their next steps in the exploration of the HMS Erebus wreck see potential for revealing more than just a treasure trove of mid-19th-century artifacts.
Pembroke Dock-built HMS Erebus could be the ship discovered by Canadian scientists searching for a 19th Century Arctic expedition.
Find could help reveal fate of Sir John Franklin's ships that disappeared in hunt for North-West Passage
After another season of searching in the cold waters off Nunavut, HMS Terror remains elusive, but new photos released today show some of the 39 artifacts recovered during the latest search of the HMS Erebus wreck site in Nunavut.
We take a closer look at the Beechey Island permafrost burials. What can they tell us about the disastrous Franklin expedition?
167 years after the doomed Franklin Arctic expedition, a new expedition to find the lost Royal Navy ships has found the first known artifact
A new drama on AMC combines history and twisted fantasy to recreate the most infamous polar expedition in history
This blog is intended as a very occasional series of rambling notes documenting my thoughts and original research relating to the 1845 Franklin Expedition.
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The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich explores the mysterious disappearance of Sir John Franklin's expedition of 1845 When they set sail from the Thames on 19 May 1845, Sir John Franklin and his crew aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were...
In my last posting, I gave some general background on the Daguerreotypes made of Franklin and his officers just before their sailing in May of 1845. There, I hinted that there was something further to be learned. With thanks to my esteemed friend Dr Huw Lewis-Jones of the Scott Polar Research Institute, who first observed this phenomenon, I pass along a vision recovered from the reflective bill of Lieutenant Graham Gore's cap (see detail, inset). The image seems clearly that of a ship, indicating that Gore's portrait was taken at dockside. Yet which ship is it? It seems to me to be a view of the stern of some vessel, but without any sails or rigging clearly visible. There seem to be masts, but one of these appears bent, and connected with another protrusion. Could one of these be the smokestack of a ship's engine, and a plume of smoke the source of this connection? If so, the vessel would seem to be either "Erebus" or "Terror." And yet tellingly, a line seems to extend from the ship's stern (if so it is), as though it were towing another vessel. If that's the case, the ship could be the screw steam sloop HMS "Rattler," for it towed both "Erebus" and "Terror" as far as Cape Wrath off Scotland. Unlike the discovery ships, which would have hoarded their coal for later, the Rattler would have been under full steam for the journey, and was far more likely to be exuding smoke during the photographic session. Rattler was the first screw-propeller driven warship in the world, and had famously won a contest with the side-wheel steamer Alecto, proving her pre-eminence by dragging the Alecto backwards at a speed of 2 knots in March of 1845. The propellor of the Rattler is on display in Portsmouth to this day. But what else can we learn from these Dauguerreotypes? My acquaintance Bill Schultz, a collector of and expert on early photography, prepared a lengthy essay on them for the 2005 edition of the Daguerreian Annual. Schultz specializes in military and naval images, and his commentary describes each officer's uniform in detail. For example, Franklin is wearing "a Cocked Hat or Chapeau, bound with black silk, which would have four loops of gold bullion with two center loops twisted." Gore, above, "wears the undress uniform of a Lieutenant according to the uniform regulation of 1843; his epaulettes have shorter braid (than those of a commander or captain) and would have been without any insignia on the strap or in the crescent." Is there more? Clearly, the photographer sent by Beard's firm chose at least two different settings, or allowed the officers to do so. Most of the subjects -- Franklin himself, Crozier, Fitzjames, Gore, Fairholme, Couch, Des Voeux, Sargent, Reid, Collins, Stanley, Goodsir, and Osmer, posed before a cloth backdrop; judging by Gore and Fairholme, this studio was set up dockside. The backdrop varies somewhat; in Goodsir's case, it seems draped or curtained, with light passing on either side, while with the others, it appears flat and opaque. Only Le Vesconte seems to have chosen to be photographed aboard ship; he stands with the wheel visible behind him, and a coil of rope hanging from the mast. In his hand he holds a book with a paper label on its cover, idnetified by Schultz as the ship's log. Ah, what any of us would give to have that book once more in our hands! There is surely still more to be learned from these images; the Daguerreotype process produces plates with an incredible level of detail, as the grain size was as little as that of a single silver halide crystal. The originals, properly copied, could be blown up by a factor of hundreds, and yield surprising results. Reproduced in the pages of the Illustrated London News and Gleason's Pictorial, endlessly peered at in hopes of some new insight, these memorial versions of the Franklin expedition's officers have a haunting quality -- for they were the first, as well as the last, we would ever have of these bold and tragic figures.
