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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

When Sir John Franklin and more than 100 sailors from the British Navy set sail in 1845 aboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to discover a Northwest Passage [phys.org], they had no idea that not one of them would live to tell the story of the expedition. Now, Parks Canada archeologists, in partnership with Inuit communities in the Northwest Territories, have made a start at piecing together their tale, thanks to the 2014 discovery of the wreck of the Erebus.

Jonathan Moore, a Parks Canada senior underwater archeologist, shared some of the excitement and mystery of the search for remains of the Franklin Expedition with the U of T Mississauga community on Feb. 9 at the Chemical and Physical Sciences Colloquium, held in the UTM Instructional Centre.

A bit of the history of the doomed expedition was known before Parks Canada began its quest, thanks to Inuit stories told to the British explorer, Dr. John Rae, in 1854, and a search launched by Lady Jane Franklin, wife of Sir John, in 1859. The latter search located a cairn on Fort William Island with the message that the two ships had been trapped in the ice for about 18 months, during which time Franklin and 23 crew members died. The remaining crew members attempted to make their way south overland, but none survived. The message gave some idea of the location of the ships. The Inuit had attempted to salvage the ships, but they sunk before the salvage was finished.

Parks Canada began a serious search for the lost ships in 2008, using both the crew's information and Inuit testimony as guides. Crews worked in vain for almost six years, but in September 2014, Moore was one of the four people aboard a small exploration ship that picked up the sonar image of a large object sitting underwater off the coast of Ugjulik, NWT.

Original Submission