Parks Canada and its Inuit partners i dentified the wrecks Erebus and Terror, in 20, respectively, marking a major turning point in the cold case.įorbidding Arctic conditions mean that the wrecks are totally inaccessible for all but five to six weeks out of the year. Over the decades that followed, search parties and sleuths discovered deserted campsites, graves and artifacts in the region that hinted at the misery and desperation of the crew as they dispersed and tried to find safety. The loss of the crew was sensational news in the mid-19th century. None of the men were ever found alive, and the expedition is considered one of the worst disasters in the history of polar exploration. These scant details were gleaned from a note the crew left in a cairn. By 1848, Franklin was dead and the surviving men abandoned their still-trapped ships. A year and a half later, their ships became trapped in ice near King William Island. ![]() In May 1845, Franklin and his 128 crew members set sail on HMS Erebus and HMS Terror from England on a quest to find the sea route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific through the Arctic Ocean. The final days of the Franklin Expedition have been shrouded in mystery for nearly two centuries. Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeology Team The 2019 field season yielded such a huge haul of objects because it marked the first time the researchers could conduct a systematic excavation of the site. "The preservation of the objects is quite phenomenal." "We have had the most successful season since the discovery of the wreck," Marc-André Bernier, manager of Parks Canada's underwater archeology team, told reporters in a press conference Friday. Among the objects brought to the surface were kitchen wares, wine bottles, a wax seal with a fingerprint, and a hairbrush with hair strands that could contain clues about the fate of Arctic explorer John Franklin and his crew. This week, the team unveiled more than 350 artifacts they recovered from just a small area of the wreck. The ship sank during the doomed Franklin Expedition of the 1840s, when British naval captain Sir John Franklin and his crew searched for the Northwest Passage. The result is a wonderfully evocative account of one of the most extraordinary adventures of the nineteenth century, as reimagined by a master explorer and storyteller.Braving water temperatures that dipped below freezing, divers spent nearly four weeks off the coast of Nunavut in northern Canada last summer exploring the HMS Erebus. ![]() And he vividly recounts the experiences of the men who first stepped ashore on Antarctica’s Victoria Land, and those who, just a few years later, froze to death one by one in the Arctic ice, as rescue missions desperately tried to reach them. He explores the intertwined careers of the men who shared its journeys: the dashing James Clark Ross who charted much of the ‘Great Southern Barrier’ and oversaw some of the earliest scientific experiments to be conducted there and the troubled John Franklin, who at the age of sixty and after a chequered career, commanded the ship on its final, disastrous expedition. Now Michael Palin – former Monty Python stalwart and much-loved television globetrotter – brings this extraordinary ship back to life, following it from its launch in 1826 to the epic voyages of discovery that led to glory in the Antarctic and to ultimate catastrophe in the Arctic. Its whereabouts had been a mystery for over a century and a half. It was broken at the stern and covered in a woolly coat of underwater vegetation. In September 2014 the wreck of a sailing vessel was discovered at the bottom of the sea in the frozen wastes of the Canadian arctic.
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