New phase of search for Franklin expedition's lost ships announced

A 160-year-old mystery could be solved this summer as the search resumes to find the doomed ships of Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.

The voyage was the demise of Franklin and the 128 men he took to the Canadian Arctic after the Royal Navy ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus he led became trapped in ice, where it is presumed they sank somewhere off Nunavut's King William Island.

"We are continuing our search for an as yet undiscovered national historic site," Environment Minister Peter Kent said Thursday in announcing the resumption of the search. "This is the year I hope we will solve one of the great mysteries in the history of Arctic exploration."

The graves of Terror and Erebus are designated together as Canada's only national historic site with no known location, as they are considered to be integral to the country's northern history.

Kent said the resumption of the search will be on Aug. 21, if the weather co-operates.

Kent's announcement was attended by British High Commissioner Andrew Pocock and Parks Canada officials.

"The search for these historic vessels by Parks Canada does not date from this year or the last couple of years, we've been involved since 1997," Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada's chief of underwater archeology said. "We've been looking for these wrecks for a long time. It's really a historical quest to (find them)."

In the past 160 years, there have been several attempts to find Terror and Erebus, the first in January 1850 when HMS Investigator and HMS Enterprise set out to locate Franklin.

Enterprise and Investigator became separated and, in 1851, the latter was locked in ice, much like the ships it was sent to locate. The crew of the Investigator abandoned ship and eventually were rescued by another British vessel after four winters in the Arctic.

In July, there will be a dive to the wreck of Investigator — off Banks Island, N.W.T. — where it finally sank in 1854.

Parks Canada found the vessel last summer using side-scan sonar technology at the bottom of the bay, now a part of Aulavik National Park.

If Erebus and Terror were to be discovered this summer, it would be an achievement for archeology. "It would close one chapter of Canadian history. It would answer the questions that have existed over the centuries, the uncertainty over exactly where (Terror and Erebus) ultimately foundered and sank," Kent said.

Interest in the vessels is not exclusive to Canada. According to Pocock, there is "genuine historical interest" in the United Kingdom, as well.

"Franklin was a considerable figure in Arctic exploration," he said. "We've been looking for Franklin for 160 years."

While Pocock said the dive on Investigator would be of interest, the real prize would be finding Franklin's vessel. "The ships themselves were quite well-known — there are two volcanoes in Antarctica called Erebus and Terror," Pocock said. The volcanoes were named by British Antarctic explorer Sir John Clark Ross, when he captained the ships in exploration of the frozen south in the early 1840s.

"Their profile and reputation — if that's the right word — are rather higher than the Investigator."

Should the three-year search by Parks Canada and the government of Nunavut for Franklin's fabled expedition comes up short, it will not be considered a failure.

"Every expedition that we do actually helps us to get closer (to finding the wreckage). We see it as a contribution to the effort to find them," Bernier said.

Even if Terror and Erebus aren't found, the search would be narrowed further: next time, the team will know where not to look.

Dives on Investigator will take place from July 10 to 25, assuming the weather is favourable.

From The Vancouver Sun

*UPDATE* - Franklin Expedition documents discovered in Arctic? Perhaps not.

A box unearthed in a Nunavut community along the Northwest Passage earlier this month contains nothing related to Arctic explorers Sir John Franklin or Roald Amundsen, government officials have announced.

The wooden box, which was believed to have been buried for decades in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, was opened by the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa on Friday.

The box was purported to contain either documents related to Franklin's ill-fated attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage in the 1840s or items from Amundsen's journey through the passage in the early 1900s.

"The remains of a cardboard box lined the bottom and sides of the interior of the wood box," the Nunavut government said in a news release issued late Tuesday. "Pieces of newspaper and what appeared to be tallow were discovered beneath the sand and rocks that filled the box

"No items related to either Amundsen or to Franklin were found."

Officials with the Nunavut government and the Institute will give more details in the coming days about the box's contents.

The box was believed to have been buried more than 80 years ago by George Washington Porter Jr., a resident of Gjoa Haven, below a large stone cairn.

It was said that he carefully placed some documents believed to be connected to the British Franklin Expedition — Sir John Franklin's attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage.

The box was excavated by Nunavut government archeologists earlier this month after descendents of Porter, who claimed they had known about its purported contents for decades, came forward.

Porter's son, Chester Porter, told CBC News during the excavation that he had kept the secret about the box for 30 years but felt now was the time to go public about what he believes are Franklin's lost documents.

Eric Mitchell, a former Hudson's Bay Co. manager who claimed to have helped the elder Porter excavate and rebury the box in 1957, has said it actually contained items Amundsen had buried in Gjoa Haven in 1905.

Mitchell said the Norwegian explorer left behind a photograph of Dr. Georg von Neumayer, a German geophysicist who had taught Amundsen about the North Magnetic Pole.

Two members of the Porter family, as well as a Nunavut government official, were on hand for the official opening of the box in Ottawa, according to the release.

Although the box did not contain what people were expecting to see, Nunavut government officials say the effort to excavate and examine the box was still a culturally significant undertaking for people in Gjoa Haven.

"We were pleased to respond to the community's request for assistance concerning this matter," Doug Stenton, Nunavut's director of culture and heritage, said in the release.

Bear Grylls tries his hand at archaeology

British adventurer, Bear Grylls, has piqued the interest of the Canadian government after reporting the discovery of skeletal human remains on a small, unnamed island in Arctic waters close to where members of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition are known to have disappeared more than 160 years ago.

The star of the popular Man vs. Wild outdoor survival TV series, claims to have found bones, charred wood and other artifacts earlier this month during a charity-fundraising expedition to cross the Northwest Passage in a rigid inflatable boat.

At the expedition website, Grylls described how he and his team members discovered the remnants of a mysterious campsite on Sept. 2 on an tiny island in Wellington Strait east of King William Island — the place where some of the survivors from Franklin’s ice-locked ships Erebus and Terror took shelter in the late 1840s before they eventually succumbed to cold and starvation.

“We found the rocky outline of a grave set by some stranded visitor long ago,” Grylls wrote at his expedition blog. “And at the grave, we saw bones. And a small piece of felt or fabric. And then as we looked there was another grave. And another, and a fourth.”

Such sites are not unheard of among Canada’s Arctic islands, where extreme cold and dry conditions can preserve archeological remains intact for generations or even centuries.

Graves from the Franklin Expedition have previously been found. In the 1980s, scientists even studied the frozen corpse of one of Franklin’s doomed sailors and shed light on the possible lead poisoning of the crew because of improperly tinned foods.

But it wasn’t immediately clear if the graves reported by Grylls had been previously documented by Nunavut or federal heritage officials.

Marc-Andre Bernier, chief of underwater archeology at Parks Canada, told Postmedia News on Sunday that he was aware of the reported discovery but reluctant to comment in detail because “we haven’t seen anything yet.”

In an email response, he added: “Of course, if analysis and study end up showing that it is related to Franklin, then it could be important — as would be any find related to this story. However, we will have to wait to get more information.”

Bernier also noted that “if it is not related to Franklin, then it will be interesting to see what it is associated to.”

Earlier this year, Bernier announced Parks Canada’s discovery — near Banks Island in the Western Arctic — of the HMS Investigator, a famous 19th-century British ship that had searched for the Franklin Expedition before becoming locked in sea ice and abandoned by its own crew.

In August, Parks Canada archeologists under Bernier’s direction also probed the seabed near King William Island in an effort to locate the Franklin Expedition’s lost ships.

That search produced no discoveries but ruled out a huge swath of the sea floor as the site of the wrecks, setting the stage for another season of underwater scanning next year in another target zone near King William Island.

From: Montreal Gazette

Franklin Expedition documents discovered in Arctic? Perhaps.

Just when you think it's over, another story pops up in the news.  It seems the mystery of the Franklin expedition has more chapters than the latest Stieg Larsson novel.

An Inuit family claims that a box that was hidden for over 80 years in the Arctic contains documents linked to the doomed Franklin Expedition.

Over the weekend, the Porter family in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, dug up the small box with the help of an archeologist.

"We knew we were looking for a wooden box, not a particularly large box. We worked our way down and sure enough, about two feet down, we got to the top of some wood," said Doug Stenton, director of culture and heritage for Nunavut.

The exact contents of the unopened, sand-filled box will not be known until the Canadian Conservation Institute carefully examines it, which should take about three weeks.

"When I get it back to Ottawa, I will be photographing it, X-raying it to see what's in the box before we start to dig the sand out," said Tara Grant of the Canadian Conservation Institute.

The box was buried years ago by George Washington Porter Jr. below a large stone cairn. Inside, he carefully placed some documents believed to be connected to the British Franklin Expedition - Sir John Franklin's attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage in the 1840s.

"The day my dad told me, I knew it was very important," said Chester Porter, the son of George Washington Porter Jr.

Chester Porter said he kept the secret to himself for 30 years.

"I think it was time to let my brothers know what my dad did, where he buried the Franklin records," he said.

Franklin's entire crew perished from starvation, scurvy and lead poisoning. Countless attempts to find any trace of Franklin have come up empty and documents are very rare.

"I'm very relieved. I feel human again, not have to think about what's under the ground," Porter said.

From CBC News

*See UPDATE on September 30, 2010*

Failed Search Deepens Mystery of Vanished Explorers

Canadian scientists' announcement Monday that they failed to find the final resting place of British naval hero Sir John Franklin deepened one of the most enduring mysteries of the Arctic.

In May 1845, Franklin set sail from England with 134 men aboard two ships, the Terror and Erebus, to search for the fabled Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. Five sailors left the ship in Greenland. The rest were never heard from again.

Last week, a six-man government survey team, supported by the Canadian Coast Guard vessel the Sir Wilfrid Laurier and its near 50-man crew, surveyed hundreds of square miles of frigid sea floor hoping to succeed where some 100 other expeditions failed—discovering the fate of the ships and a crew whose demise has been attributed to factors from lead poisoning to cannibalism.

For Canadians, the disappearance is "a Victorian gothic horror story that played out across the Arctic," said Ryan Harris, a government archeologist who is leading this summer's search.

Their government believes that locating the expedition's resting place will bolster its sovereignty over the sea lane Franklin sought. Though the Franklin expedition was British, London has signed over caretaker rights to Canada.

Franklin, the veteran of two Arctic expeditions and the Battle of Trafalgar, was from a line of British explorers seeking a northern link to the Pacific. The then-global superpower kitted his ships with the latest technology, including a water-distillation system and heating.

On July 26, 1845, a whaler made a last sighting of Franklin's ships as they hovered at one entrance into the Arctic. Experts believe the expedition journeyed on for more than a year, becoming trapped in ice off King William Island the next September.

Victorian England idolized explorers, and Franklin's disappearance inspired plays, songs and a 12-year search. Financed mostly through Franklin's wife and the British Navy, some 36 expeditions sought the lost crew.

Early searchers found the bodies of some sailors, some in formal graves that identified the crew members by name. They also recovered sailors' possessions and other relics among native Inuits.

In 1859, a Royal Navy search party found a message under a cairn on King William Island that detailed how the crew had abandoned their ships after being trapped in ice for a year. Its writer said Franklin had died in 1847 and remaining crew would head to Back's River, hundreds of miles to the south. The British gave up looking.

Canada's search continues. In the 1960s, it has sent its army to look. Amateurs have put fortunes and lives on the line after catching what they call the "Franklin bug."

At age 17, David Woodman packed hiking boots and a sleeping bag and headed north from his home in London, Ontario, to begin a search that has spanned 30 years and 10 expeditions. For the past three summers, he has remained in Vancouver, as he and other explorers say they have been unable to obtain government permits to search. Recently, Mr. Woodman bumped into members of the current expedition and tried to muscle in. "I told them, 'I would come and wash socks,' " he said.

Louie Kamookak, an Inuk hunter raised in the region where the ships are believed to have disappeared, has been advising the Canadian government in their searches. He said his interest began when he was told by his great-grandmother of a silver teaspoon and grave she had seen when young, which he believed were Franklin expedition relics. Mr. Kamookak has been looking ever since.

Many mysteries remain. High levels of lead were found in sailor's bodies, leading to theories that their deaths were hastened through poisoning from lead-sealed canned food or via the water-distillation system. Blade cuts on bones have been interpreted as a sign of Inuit attack; native testimony backs up claims of Inuit cannibalism.

But all theories have counterarguments. Even the note's claim that the crew would break for Back's River is disputed, given how far away it is.

One hope is to garner clues from the ship's log, which Mr. Woodman and others believe would be sealed on a ship or in Franklin's grave. Archeologists believe that if the wrecks are found they will be well preserved, given the depth they are expected to be submerged at will have protected them from the sea's ebb and flow.

"There are thousands of theories to grasp onto the Franklin story, because we don't really know what happened," said Mr. Woodman.

Mr. Harris's survey, working from Inuit testimony from the time, searched just east of O'Reilly Island, north of the Canadian mainland.

On Monday, Mr. Harris said they came back empty-handed, after scouring about half of the area they had pinpointed. His next trip, he said, would have to wait for another year.

From The Wall Street Journal