The wreck was found in Victoria Strait off King William Island, not far from the Inuit village of Cambridge Bay. The two vessels were ultimately engulfed by ice. In the 1980s, Canadian researchers said the remains of expedition members found on Beechey Island indicated they had died of cold, hunger and lead poisoning from canned food.īones discovered also showed signs of cannibalism. On April 22, 1848, 105 survivors left the ships in an attempt to reach solid ground on foot, but none survived. The message revealed that Franklin and 23 crew members died on June 11, 1847, in unspecified circumstances. It turns out the sailors became trapped in ice for a year and half, and eventually ran out of supplies. The fate of the Franklin Expedition didn't become clearer until 1859, when a vessel chartered by Franklin's widow Lady Jane came across a somber message on King William Island.
And no-one, aside from perhaps the occasional Inuit hunter, ever saw them alive again.
The last Europeans to have contact with the ships were crew members of two whaling boats that passed them in Baffin Bay in August 1845.īut as the explorers pushed into the Arctic archipelago, they soon ran into problems. A 1997 memorandum of understanding between Great Britain, as owner of HMS Erebus and Terror, and Canada, as the nation in whose waters they are believed to have been lost, assigns control over 'site investigation, excavation, or recovery of either of the wrecks or their contents' to Canada, in the event of their discovery. 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. Under the command of Sir John Franklin and Captain Francis Crozier, the two vessels, with a combined crew of 134, left the shores of Britain on May 19, 1845, to discover the Northwest Passage that links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
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