The HMS Terror And The Lost Franklin Expedition
Wikimedia CommonsThe Terror was initially built as a bomb vessel and even participated in several skirmishes in the War of 1812 before Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition.
The HMS Terror and her sister ship Erebus set sail from Greenhithe, England, on May 19, 1845, with a crew of 134 men.
Headed by captain John Franklin, the so-called Franklin Expedition set out to discover the elusive Northwest Passage which would be a direct path to Asia and a lucrative trade route.
The expedition was comprised of 24 officers and 110 men and carried three years’ worth of food in its bowels. Unfortunately, much of it had been improperly tinned, which would naturally spell severe trouble for those aboard.
The HMS Terror and HMS Erebus were last spotted near Baffin Bay off the west coast of Greenland in July 1845, and weren’t seen again until at the bottom of the Arctic over a century later.
The first remains of the expedition were found five years after its disappearance when some of the frozen bodies of the crew were discovered buried in graves dated 1846 on an uninhabited speck of land named Beechey Island. But it took until 1980 for those graves to be rediscovered and exhumed for analysis by Owen Beattie of the University of Alberta. His team found that the bodies contained clear signs of lead poisoning from improperly tinned food.
The sunken shipwrecks of Terror and Erebus themselves were not discovered until 2014 and 2016, respectively, when Parks Canada announced a $75,000, six-week search for them in order to bolster the country’s claim over the resource-heavy arctic.
Seriously Creepy Stuff/YouTubeBody of John Torrington, crew member on the Franklin Expedition, found perfectly preserved in the Arctic ice in 1984.
The Erebus was found at the bottom of the eastern portion of Queen Maud Gulf, west of O’Reilly Island, and the Terror was discovered by the Arctic Research Foundation. The latter was extremely well-preserved. Using submersible drones, audiences around the world were able to view the long-lost vessel in all its glory for the first time in history.
Oddly, there were no obvious signs of damage to either of the ships that may have suggested they were sunk and the crew forced to abandon them. Instead, researchers now believed that the poor sailors were forced to abandon the ships after they became lodged in the ice, and died or resorted to cannibalism in their attempt to trek overland to a nearby outpost for help.
