HMS Erebus & Terror

1845

The Franklin Expedition, swallowed by the Arctic Location: King William Island, Nunavut, Canada · Coordinates: 68.9°N 98.8°W (approximate) · Casualties: 129 · Survivors: 0 · Depth: 11 m (Erebus) · 24 m (Terror) · Cause: ice · starvation — Beset by pack ice in Victoria Strait from September 1846. Abandoned April 1848 after the deaths of Franklin and 23 others. The remaining 105 men marched south; all died from exposure, starvation, lead poisoning, and in the final stages, cannibalism. · Fate: found 2014 · 2016 · Type: exploration · Royal Navy bomb vessels · Tonnage: 372 tons (Erebus) · 325 tons (Terror) · Crew: 129 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1826 (Erebus) · 1813 (Terror) Sir John Franklin's expedition to find the Northwest Passage vanished with all hands. Inuit testimony of cannibalism among the final survivors was dismissed by Victorian society and vindicated by 20th-century forensic archaeology. The ships themselves were not found until the 2010s, exactly where the Inuit had always said they were. The Vessel HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were Hecla-class bomb vessels of the Royal Navy, small three-masted ships built originally in the Napoleonic era to carry mortars for shore bombardment. Terror was laid down at Topsham in 1813; Erebus at Pembroke Dockyard in 1826. Their mortars had been removed in the 1830s and their hulls strengthened for polar work: their bows were reinforced with iron plating, their internal frames doubled, their keels braced against ice pressure. They had been built thickly enough in the first place to absorb the recoil of twelve-inch mortars, which made them some of the strongest small ships the Royal Navy had ever built. Both ships had circumnavigated Antarctica under James Clark Ross between 1839 and 1843 and had proved their ice-worthiness in conditions harder than any they were likely to see in the Arctic. On their refit for the 1845 Arctic expedition, they were fitted with 20-horsepower steam engines adapted from London and Greenwich Railway locomotives, coupled to screw propellers that could be lifted clear of the ice. Each ship carried three years of provisions, tinned meat from the contractor Stephan Goldner, and the finest ice-capable hulls the Royal Navy had produced. The expedition was to be commanded by Sir John Franklin, 59 years old, a veteran of Trafalgar and of two previous Arctic expeditions, recently returned from a six-year governorship of Van Diemen's Land. His second-in-command was Francis Crozier in Terror; his first officer in Erebus was J The Disaster The details of the march and deaths of Franklin's 105 were reconstructed piecewise across 150 years from Inuit oral testimony, scattered skeletal remains, the 1854 report of the Hudson's Bay surveyor John Rae, and the forensic archaeology of the late twentieth century. The party walked south for perhaps 300 kilometres before it broke apart, leaving small groups to die on the island and on the mainland opposite. Lead poisoning from the solder of Goldner's tinned provisions, scurvy from insufficient vitamin C, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and exposure were the principal causes. Inuit witnesses reported to Rae in 1854 that the final survivors had been reduced to cannibalism. Rae's report was attacked by Dickens and the Royal Navy establishment as slander; modern forensic analysis of cut marks on recovered bones has vindicated Rae. Lady Franklin, her husband's widow, funded a decade of search expeditions between 1847 and 1857 that mapped most of the Canadian Arctic in the process of failing to recover her husband's body. Her 1857 Fox expedition under Leopold McClintock found the Point Victory cairn with its 1848 note, Franklin's death record, and the tracks of the southward march. The expedition became the model and the recruiting device for most of the great polar explorations of the next half-century. The ships themselves, abandoned on the ice, drifted south with the pack. Inuit witnesses reported to McClintock, Charles Francis Hall, and Frederick Schwatka between 1857 and 1880 tha