#EREBUS SHIPWRECK SERIES#

While it may seem surprising that the ships should be found so far from where they were deserted, the Erebus wreck site is actually exactly where Inuit oral traditions have long said one of the ships sank. After all, she notes, “the overall ice break-up and drift pattern from where the ships were deserted is from north to south.”īut it is notable, Lockhart continues, that in the 19th century, “Inuit reported having observed signs of men on or about HMS Erebus prior to its sinking.” Revisiting Inuit Accounts Was it possible that, after setting out across land, at least some of the crew had a change of heart and returned to the ships to sail them south? Or is there another reason for their position?Īccording to Brandy Lockhart, an underwater archeologist with Parks Canada who has dived on both wrecks, it’s possible that the abandoned vessels were carried to their final resting places by the same ice that had entombed them. Terror was about 60 miles south of where the 1848 note said the ships had been abandoned, and Erebus was 30 miles farther south still. But at first, it only deepened the mystery-the wrecks were in the wrong place.

The immediate and ongoing hope was that the discovery of the wrecks would fill in the missing pieces and shine a light on what happened to the Franklin Expedition. And three years after that, the wreck sites’ first-ever visitors, passengers from the Adventure Canada-chartered ship Ocean Endeavour, watched as archeologists probed the Erebus for secrets. Two years later, another team found the almost-pristine wreck of Terror, in deeper water to its companion’s northwest. And then, in September 2014, a search team found the wreck of Erebus, sitting in just 11 meters (36 feet) of water. Erebus and Terror Wrecks Foundįor 170 years, such snippets were all that existed. Stories from local Inuit of white men who had slowly perished of ships that had been caught in, and then disappeared beneath, the ice. Letters from one of the men, some written phonetically and some backward and few fully deciphered.

Other clues trickled in: An abandoned sled, with two skeletons and numerous personal effects. A note at another site, dated April 1848 and indicating that Franklin and 23 others were dead, the ships had been trapped in the ice for 18 months, and the survivors were abandoning ship and striking out across land. Rescue expeditions turned up tantalizing clues: A trio of graves at one site.

#EREBUS SHIPWRECK SERIES#

A Series of Clues to the Fate of the Franklin Expedition This symposium will: outline recent Parks Canada shipwreck research in the Arctic present interim archaeological results from the wrecks of Erebus and Terror from 2016-2019 outline selected methods and approaches employed and point to what we have gleaned so far about the Franklin Expedition from these two remarkable wrecks.Sir John Franklin and his crew, illustrated for the London News, circa 1845.

Erebus was relocated in 2014 and Terror in 2016 following searches led by Parks Canada in conjunction with many partners. The ships became trapped by ice in 1846, Franklin died in 1847, the ships were deserted in 1848 and no one survived a southward retreat. Erebus and Terror, two converted bomb vessels that were exquisitely equipped and provisioned, carried Franklin and 128 men into the heart of what is now Canada's Arctic archipelago.

The Wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site of Canada commemorates Sir John Franklin’s 1845 Royal Navy expedition in search of a northwest passage. This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled 'The Wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site of Canada: 2016-2019 Underwater Archaeological Investigations,' at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Erebus shipwreck