Hundreds of discoveries made on Sir John Franklin’s ships, but storm damage makes wrecks increasingly dangerous
Archaeologists have made hundreds of new finds on the wreck of HMS Erebus, the ship commanded by Sir John Franklin on his doomed Arctic trip 180 years ago.
The team’s discoveries include pistols, sealed bottles of medicines, seamen’s chests and navigation equipment. These are now being studied for clues to explain the loss of the Erebus and its sister ship Terror, and the deaths of the 129 men who sailed on them.
The work is considered to be particularly urgent because the wreck of the Erebus – discovered 10 years ago in shallow water in Wilmot and Crampton Bay in Arctic Canada – is now being battered by increasingly severe storms as climate change takes its grip on the region.
“Parts of the ship’s upper deck collapsed recently and other parts are sloping over dangerously,” said Jonathan Moore, manager of the Parks Canada underwater team that completed the most recent exploration of the wreck. “It’s getting tricky down there.”
Investigators’ efforts were made even more pressing by Covid-19, which halted all exploration in 2020 and 2021, and by severe weather that badly disrupted investigations in 2018. As a result, marine archaeologists have been left in a race against time to unlock the vessel’s secrets.
Sir John Franklin set off from Greenhithe in Kent in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage, a polar route that linked the Atlantic and Pacific. His ships, Erebus and Terror, were fitted with steam-driven propellers to help them manoeuvre in pack ice while their holds were filled with three years’ worth of tinned provisions. The ships failed to return, however, and it was not until the 1850s that the Scottish explorer John Rae discovered, after interviewing Inuits, that Franklin had died in 1847 after his ships had been trapped in sea ice for two years.
