Relics from the lost
expedition include
these, found in 1859
in an abandoned boat
on King William Island:
blue-tinted snow
goggles, a chronometer
used to determine
longitude, and a book
of Christian melodies.
An 1878-79 search
uncovered a British
Navy boot on the
mainland—the farthest
known point reached
by expedition crew.
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM,
GREENWICH, LONDON (ALL)hoping to find survivors and, when all hope was
gone, clues to the expedition’s fate. They found
deserted campsites, the bones of dead men, and
hundreds of mementos, from fragments of cot-
ton shirts to silver dessert spoons. Inuit hunt-
ers recalled seeing starving crewmen dragging
heavy sledges along the ice, and later finding
evidence of cannibalism. The British public was
reluctant to believe it, and the final days of the
Franklin expedition remained the subject of
enduring fascination and mythmaking.
Then, in 2014, Erebus was discovered in rel-
atively shallow water south of King William
Island, almost exactly where historical Inuit tes-
timony had placed it. Two years later, Terror was
located at the bottom of a large bay after Inuit
Canadian Ranger Sammy Kogvik led research-
ers to the area. Terror is so well preserved, says
Parks Canada archaeologist Ryan Harris, that
it resembles a ghost ship: “It just beggars the
imagination what might lie inside.”
A second research team, supported by the gov-
ernment of the Canadian territory of Nuna vut, is
now sifting through other important clues found
on land. Led by Douglas Stenton, an archaeol-
ogist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario,
these scientists are mapping the sites where
Franklin crew members pitched tents, downed
rations, and huddled beneath blankets and bear-
skins. By studying these locations and analyzing
the human remains and artifacts recovered from
them, Stenton and his colleagues hope to shed
new light on the expedition’s final tragic days.ON A COLD, BLUSTERY day in the Arctic hamlet
of Gjoa Haven, Kogvik recalls the joy of seeing
Terror appear for the first time on a sonar screen.
Like most Inuit in the region, Kogvik had heard
stories about the lost expedition. He also had
one of his own. While out fishing with a friend
along the west coast of King William Island,
he had once seen a big wooden pole sticking
above the water. He thought it could be a ship’s
mast, so in September 2016, Kogvik guided a
team from the Arctic Research Foundation, a
Canadian nonprofit, to the area. After hours
of searching the seafloor with side-scan sonar,
Kogvik and his colleagues found Terror, about
80 feet underwater. “Every one of us was giving
high fives,” he recalls.
Today Parks Canada archaeologists are plan-
ning to excavate both Franklin ships, but Erebus
is their priority. Harsh Arctic conditions now102 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC