The story of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition
On May 19, 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin left Greenhithe in England with 129 officers and men on two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to cross the last un-navigated sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic.
The Northwest Passage is a route connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean that was not successfully navigated by boat until 1906 when Roald Amundsen traversed the passage on the Gjøa.
Britain’s Admiralty was hopeful that, within a year, Sir John and the two ships would arrive in the Bering Strait, having successfully charted the Northwest Passage.
On July 26, 1845, the expedition was spotted by whalers off the coast of Baffin Island. Then they disappeared, and it was only in 1859 that clues to the fate of the 129 men on board the ships became apparent. The remains of the Terror and Erebus were finally discovered by Canadian searchers 150 years after the expedition set off in 2014 and 2016.
It was a heroic but doomed story of cannabilism, hypothermia, lead poisoning, frostbite, and scurvy in the deep Arctic and one that has recently been dramatized in “The Terror”, a horror drama, that premiered on March 25, 2018, on AMC. The series featured Jared Harris as Commander Francis Crozier, Tobias Menzies as Commander James Fitzjames, Paul Ready as Dr Harry Goodsir, and Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin.
There were countless stories told in the oral history of the Inuit people who live in this Arctic region who remembered meeting shadowy kabloonas (outsiders or white men), desperate expedition survivors.
There was also the episode of the dead girl Weesy Coppin, who gave signals to her family about Franklin's resting place and his ships. In addition, there were many “ghost ship” sightings of the Erebus and Terror in Arctic waters from 1850-1860, supposedly from the lost souls of the expedition, whipped up by stories from Innuit spirit legends.
The TV show may have dramatically depicted the Franklin expedition, but the reality was far more frightening. The men were driven to despair by the cold and unforgiving Arctic.
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