Minister upbeat despite failure to find lost Franklin ships

Parks Canada prepares to look for the two lost ships of Sir John Franklin. (PHOTO BY JONATHAN MOORE, PARKS CANADA)

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were lost during the storied Franklin expedition of 1845. (PAINTING BY J. FRANKLIN WRIGHT)

RANDY BOSWELL
Postmedia News

Environment Minister Peter Kent said Thursday the Conservative government intends to continue supporting a Parks Canada hunt for the lost ships of the 19th-century Franklin Expedition, despite an August search in Arctic waters — the third in the past four summers — that failed to find the sunken HMS Terror and HMS Erebus.

Kent expressed some disappointment that, “unfortunately, we have not yet found those fabled vessels,” but added: “I can assure you that this will be an ongoing project.”

Kent, who oversees Parks Canada, and the federal agency’s top underwater archeologists were more upbeat, however, about a successful expedition in July to the wreck of the HMS Investigator, one of many British vessels sent in the 1850s to look for the lost ships of legendary Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin.

The Investigator, which became locked in ice off Banks Island and sank in the relatively shallow Mercy Bay in 1854, was discovered last year by a Parks Canada-led team of researchers. A two-week series of dives this summer at the wreck site, and additional research along the nearby shore, produced an array of intriguing artifacts and confirmed that the largely intact Investigator could contain thousands of other well-preserved relics below its main deck.

Among the artifacts retrieved in July were a rifle — still in good condition — and a sailor’s shoe, as well as protective copper sheeting from the hull of the ship. It’s being tested to compare with other metal artifacts salvaged by Inuit from stranded British ships and used for tools and trade goods throughout the last half of the 19th century.

“Diving the wreck of the HMS Investigator for the first time, Parks Canada archeologists were successful in capturing outstanding images and video of this Arctic gem,” Kent said in a prepared statement, adding that the research material gathered in the water and on land “will undoubtedly reveal unprecedented information on the early inhabitants and European explorers of Canada’s High Arctic.”

Kent also said that while the hunt for Terror and Erebus came up empty, the research team was successful in “ruling out another 140 square kilometres” of Arctic waters and that “the search for the elusive wrecks of the Franklin Expedition is further narrowed.”

Kent and Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada’s chief of underwater archeology, emphasized that the seabed scanning aimed at finding the Franklin vessels also yielded valuable mapping imagery of the ocean floor in a stretch of the Arctic Ocean — located between Victoria and King William islands — that forms part of the southern route of the Northwest Passage.

The ongoing retreat of Arctic ice and the expected increase in northern shipping will require such detailed information to better chart safe navigation routes, they noted.

Kent did not specify whether the government would back another search for the ships next summer.

“We haven’t formalized another expedition, but I’m sure that Parks Canada and all of its partners will work to commit to continued surveys and to search for Erebus and Terror,” said Kent.

But he said the ships remain a key target for the official keepers of Canadian heritage, since the Franklin Expedition represents not only “the mystery of a heroic tragedy for Canada” but also the climax of a centuries-long hunt for the Northwest Passage that “fascinated people around the world.”

Previous searches by federal scientists in 2008 and 2010 were steered by historical reports that situated one of the lost ships near O’Reilly Island, southwest of King William Island.

This year’s search was targeting an area farther north, where the other ship is believed to have gone down after remaining trapped near the Royal Geographical Society Islands.

Both Terror and Erebus had become stuck in ice in September 1846. Franklin died on June 11, 1847, with the ships still immobilized.

In April 1848, the rest of his crew abandoned the ships, intending to march over land and frozen water to salvation in mainland Canada. They all perished en route.

The HMS Investigator, captained by Irish-born Robert McClure, had left a British port in 1850 to join what had become a desperate search for the lost ships and missing 129 men from Franklin’s expedition.

McClure entered the Arctic from the Pacific but was forced to leave the ship when it became locked in ice at Mercy Bay in 1853. He ordered the creation of a cache of supplies on the nearby shore of Banks Island, then led his men on a sledge journey across the sea ice to their rescue by another British ship at Melville Island.

The crew’s eastward route back to Britain marked the first recorded transit of the Northwest Passage — a combined voyage by ship and sledge that won McClure everlasting fame despite his failure to find Franklin and the loss of the Investigator.