Franklin’s Lost Expedition: Two Ships, 129 Men and the Arctic Mystery Solved Only in the 21st Century

On a July afternoon in 1845, two whaling captains in Baffin Bay spotted something unusual: a pair of Royal Navy ships, Erebus and Terror, waiting for the ice to loosen its grip so they could push into Lancaster Sound. The whalers waved, exchanged pleasantries, and sailed on. Neither of them, nor anyone else from the outside world, would ever see those ships or their crews again. What happened next would take more than a century and a half, and a small army of searchers, scientists, and Inuit testimony, to even partially piece together.

A Passage Almost Found

The hunt for a Northwest Passage connecting Europe to Asia by sailing over the top of North America had occupied European explorers since the days of Columbus. By the early 1800s, centuries of voyages by figures like Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, and later the Hudson’s Bay Company’s surveyors had mapped most of Canada’s Arctic coastline, ruling out a passage anywhere in the temperate latitudes. Sir John Barrow, who served as Second Secretary of the Admiralty for four decades, kept pushing expedition after expedition northward in search of the missing link. By 1845, the unexplored area that might still hide a passage had shrunk to a single quadrilateral of roughly 70,000 square miles.

Barrow wanted one more expedition to close the gap, and he wanted a strong commander. His first three choices — William Edward Parry, James Clark Ross, and James Fitzjames — all turned him down or were ruled out, for reasons ranging from exhaustion with the Arctic to a promise made to a new wife to simple youth. Francis Crozier declined too, out of modesty. Barrow settled, somewhat reluctantly, on 59-year-old Sir John Franklin, a veteran of earlier Arctic expeditions who had already survived two difficult overland journeys along the Canadian coast.

Setting Sail with Confidence and Flawed Tins

Franklin’s two ships were about as well-equipped as Victorian technology allowed. Erebus and Terror had both served in Antarctic exploration under James Clark Ross, and for this voyage they were fitted with steam engines converted from old railway locomotives, reinforced iron-plated bows, internal steam heating, and retractable propellers and rudders to shield them from ice damage. They carried libraries of more than a thousand books and three years of food, including tinned soup, vegetables, salted meat, pemmican, and live cattle.

That food supply held a hidden flaw. The tinning contract went to a provisioner named Stephen Goldner just seven weeks before departure, leaving him to rush an order of 8,000 tins. The haste showed: the lead soldering on many tins was later described as thick, sloppy, and prone to dripping down the inside surface like melted wax — a detail that would matter far more than anyone realized at the time.

The expedition departed Greenhithe, Kent, on 19 May 1845 with 134 men aboard. After stops in Orkney and then Greenland, where ten oxen were slaughtered for fresh meat and five sick men were sent home, the crew settled at 129 officers and men. Most were English, with smaller numbers of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish sailors, plus one Canadian and one Norwegian. Franklin, notably, had banned swearing and drunkenness aboard. In late July, the whalers Prince of Wales and Enterprise spotted the ships in Baffin Bay. It was the last confirmed sighting by European eyes.

Icebound

What happened afterward has had to be reconstructed slowly, through searches, Inuit accounts, and a single scrap of paper. The crew wintered at Beechey Island in 1845–46, where three men died and were buried. They then sailed down Peel Sound through the summer of 1846 before Erebus and Terror became trapped in ice off King William Island in September 1846. The ships, it’s believed, never sailed again.

A document known as the Victory Point Note, left in a cairn and recovered eleven years later in 1859, offers the only firsthand account of what followed. Written in two parts on a pre-printed Admiralty form, it recorded that the ships had wintered off King William Island through 1846–47 and 1847–48, and that Franklin himself had died on 11 June 1847. By the time the second portion of the note was written, on 25 April 1848, Franklin and 23 others were dead. The survivors, now commanded by Crozier and Fitzjames, abandoned the ships and set out on foot the following day, aiming for the Back River on the Canadian mainland, roughly 250 miles away.

None of them made it to safety. Archaeological evidence suggests the entire remaining crew died along that march, most of them still on King William Island. A smaller group of perhaps thirty or forty men reached the northern coast of the mainland before dying there too, still hundreds of miles from any outpost of the wider world.

The Long Search

Franklin’s wife, Jane, pushed the Admiralty hard, and in 1848 a formal search began. It would stretch across decades and spawn its own dramatic chapter: Robert McClure, leading one of the Franklin search expeditions, endured serious hardship but succeeded in finding an ice-bound route linking the Atlantic and Pacific — a version of the passage Franklin himself had been seeking. It would not be until 1906 that Roald Amundsen actually sailed the Northwest Passage by boat, aboard the Gjøa.

The searches for Franklin turned up artifacts and, eventually, the remains of two crew members, which were brought back to Britain. In 1854, searcher John Rae reported disturbing testimony gathered from Inuit sources suggesting the expedition’s desperate final survivors had resorted to cannibalism. Modern forensic study of recovered bones, carried out over the following century and a half, found cut marks consistent with that account.

Those same scientific studies pointed to a grim, compounding set of causes of death: hypothermia, starvation, scurvy, and possibly lead poisoning or zinc deficiency, layered on top of plain exposure in a hostile environment where the men lacked adequate clothing and food. The sloppy soldering on Goldner’s rushed tins, it turns out, may have leached lead into the crew’s food for years — a slow poisoning running alongside the cold and hunger that eventually killed them all.

The physical ships themselves stayed hidden far longer than the story of their crew. In 2014, a search team led by Parks Canada finally located the wreck of Erebus in Queen Maud Gulf. Two years later, the Arctic Research Foundation found Terror resting in a bay south of King William Island that, fittingly, bears the ship’s name. Both wrecks are now protected together as the Wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site, and dive teams return to study them every year.

What We Still Don’t Know

Much of the expedition’s fate has been pieced together from fragments — a single note, scattered bones, Inuit oral testimony gathered decades after the fact — rather than any complete record. Exactly how the final days of each man unfolded, and the precise order and circumstances of the deaths beyond what the Victory Point Note records, remains unknown. The relative weight of lead poisoning against starvation, scurvy, and exposure in killing the crew is still debated among the researchers who have studied the recovered remains. And while the two wreck sites have now been found and are being actively explored, more than a century and a half after the ships vanished into the ice, they may still hold answers about those final desperate months that no document or bone fragment has yet revealed.

Sources

– This article is a synthesis of the Wikipedia article on Franklin’s lost expedition (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin’s_lost_expedition), which itself cites the underlying scholarship. Readers wanting primary sources should follow that article’s reference list.