Nova (1974–…): Season 42, Episode 14 - Arctic Ghost Ship - full transcript
160 years ago, the Franklin Expedition to chart the Northwest Passage vanished. NOVA is on board as a Canadian team makes a breakthrough discovery of one of Franklin's lost ships--a vital new clue to the fate of the ill-starred expedition.
It's the most ambitious
expedition of its day
In 1845, British
explorer Sir John Franklin
heads into the frozen
wilderness of the Arctic
to conquer the fabled
shortcut to the Orient:
the Northwest Passage
But this grand expedition
would never return home
There is no story in the
history of British exploration
that ends as tragically as this
129 men disappear
off the face of the earth
Again and again,
searchers ventured
into this icy wasteland,
an effort that
continues to this day
Over time, a meager
trail of clues emerged
Hints of illness, starvation,
even cannibalism
But no sign of
Franklin's two ships
What happened to them?
This maddening mystery has
remained unsolved for 170 years
But now, archaeologists
are mounting
a far-reaching modern
search for Franklin's lost ships
Ships don't just disappear
If there is a Franklin
expedition ship,
we will find that ship
Combining
21st-century technology
with previously dismissed
eyewitness accounts,
they make an astonishing find
Jabbed my finger
right at the screen
and kind of lunged
for it and said,
"That's it, that's it!"
This amazing
journey into the Arctic
could solve a mystery
170 years in the making
and rewrite the
history of exploration
Search for the "Arctic Ghost
Ship," right now on NOVA.
The Canadian Arctic
As the summer of
2014 comes to an end
the ice is closing in
Working from icebreakers,
a team of wreck hunters
is scouring the ocean floor
with their sonar equipment
They're searching for two ships
believed to have sunk
in these frozen waters
in the 19th century
This high-tech
mission is only the latest
in a long history
of failed attempts
to solve a perplexing mystery
What happened to the British
explorer Sir John Franklin
and his crew of 128 fine sailors
when they sailed two
heavily fortified ships
into this Arctic wasteland
and then vanished off
the face of the earth?
That question has gone
unanswered for 170 years
And now, after
weeks of searching,
yet another effort,
like all those before it,
seems on the verge of failure
Are you worried about
that ice coming in?
That's not good
In just days, these seas
could freeze over completely
Are you going to stop it?
Yeah
So, let's head back
towards the ship
Their window is closing
The mystery has
its origins in 1845,
as two great ships leave
England on a historic quest
to map the fabled
Northwest Passage
European traders
had long understood
that the most direct route
to the Orient lay to the west,
if only they could find a
way over the Americas
Why not go over the top?
The world narrows as you go up
Go across the top
of North America
And so the idea was to find
what they called the
Northwest Passage
The approaches from
both the Atlantic and Pacific
were already surveyed
But in between, the charts
showed a mysterious gap,
an area that had defied
explorers for centuries
So in 1845, Sir John Franklin
set out to find once and for all
whether the gap could be bridged
and to claim the passage
for the British Empire
The fact that there's an
empty space on the chart,
a terra incognita,
that's both appealing,
but also an insult
to the British Navy
They need to fill in
the lines on the map
There's power in the ink
lines that are drawn on charts
It's ownership
It's sovereignty
It's politics
To conquer the
Northwest Passage,
the Navy put together
the best equipped
Arctic expedition
there had ever been
Sir John Franklin, a
veteran of the Arctic,
was chosen to lead
Sir John Franklin was
one of the two or three
outstanding polar navigators
of the first half of
the 19th century
He combined experience,
scientific expertise,
and a proven track
record as a leader of men
59-year-old Franklin had led
two previous Arctic expeditions
to survey the coastline of
the North American mainland
During one trip,
when supplies ran low,
the crew had to eat
anything they could to survive,
and Franklin became
affectionately known
as "the man who
ate his own boots"
This time, he was
better prepared
He and his crew of 128 men
sailed on two specially
adapted former warships:
HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
These young men had
left behind their loved ones
in pursuit of the greatest
prize in Arctic exploration
They knew the ships
would encounter ice,
so the hulls were
strengthened with oak planking
up to eight feet thick and
reinforced with iron plate
Plans from the National
Maritime Museum in London
show they were also
fitted with innovations
such as coal-powered
steam propulsion,
a retractable propeller,
and even central heating
The ships were stocked with
three years of food rations,
a library,
even musical instruments
to help pass the time
They were better equipped
than any previous expedition
But how prepared
could they really be
for a world about which
they knew so little?
It was very much
the dark side of the moon
as far as the Victorians
were concerned
It was somewhere
that had fascinated men
for hundreds of years,
but they'd never
mastered the environment
In July 1845, a whaling
ship recorded a final sighting
of the expedition in Baffin
Bay, west of Greenland
From there, they
sailed into oblivion
In the 170 years since then,
despite scores of
well-equipped search attempts,
only a few meager
clues have been found,
and no trace of the ships
In 2014, a crack
team of wreck hunters
embarks on a fresh search
Writer and historian John Geiger
has been obsessed with
the mystery for decades
To him, this is a
once-in-a-lifetime chance
to lay the ghosts of the
Franklin expedition to rest
Been involved in one way
or another with Franklin
since my 20s
It's the greatest mystery
in exploration history
There's nothing
that compares with it
It's really important from
a historical standpoint
to understand what
happened to them
Only by finding the wrecks
can crucial questions
be answered
Exactly why did
the expedition fail?
And how far through the
Northwest Passage did they get?
It won't be easy
The wrecks remain lost,
largely because
searching these icy waters
is such a difficult
and dangerous task
In recent years, the government
of Canada and its partners
have mounted
several expeditions,
deploying icebreakers
and sonar equipment
to hunt down the wrecks
But these costly missions
have another purpose
As global warming melts the ice,
interest in extracting the
Arctic's natural resources
will likely grow
These surveys will allow
safer navigation here
in the years to come
These vessels host
a diverse taskforce
led by the underwater
archaeology team
of Parks Canada
This is actually our
sixth field season
searching for
Franklin's lost ships
We're hoping that there's
going to be a payday
down the road here
Despite the calm exterior,
the team is desperate
for a breakthrough
In the last six years,
they've searched
close to 500 square miles
of seafloor and found nothing
They have two key search zones
One, in the north,
is based on clues found
by earlier search parties
Further south, a second zone
is based on sightings of a ship
preserved in the oral history
of local Inuit populations
But even after six years,
there's still a huge
area to search
In the north, sea ice often
lingers through the summer,
so plenty of this area
remains unsurveyed
This year, they
hope to put that right
We're looking in the very place
where Erebus and
Terror were last reported
by the men who
sailed those ships
You know, if you lose your keys,
you generally go
back and look for them
in the last place you
remember seeing them
By combining the last
known position of the ships
with information on
prevailing currents,
the team has drawn up
a northern search zone
of some 540 square miles
So how will they search such
a huge expanse of seafloor
during the brief Arctic summer?
This year, for the first time,
they have a secret weapon
It's basically an
unmanned torpedo
that we can deploy
pre-programmed
and it will literally
go out in the sea,
follow the route that
we've asked it to follow,
gather data, and come
back with that data
This is the Arctic Explorer,
a precision piece
of military hardware
that uses sonar to scan
a square mile of seafloor
in just an hour
The sonar itself,
which is an acoustic system,
that will send a signal to
the bottom and recapture it
to give a picture of
what's on the bottom
It produces images like this,
showing the seafloor
in incredible detail
Any sign of a ship would
show up immediately
But if there's any hint of
ice, the team will have to pull
this delicate instrument
out of the water
The last thing they need
is to lose their
best search vehicle
For the first two
weeks of the search,
drifting ice floes
have prevented them
from deploying
the Arctic Explorer
But their luck may
be about to change
We're seeing a growing
surface area of open water
A small window in the
ice is an opportunity
to deploy the Arctic
Explorer for the first time
It's a risk,
but just one pass could
be enough to reveal a wreck
It looks like we should
try to get into action
Wary of rogue ice floes,
the team will track
the submersible
every step of the way
For several hours, it will track
up and down the search zone,
scanning an area
of a few square miles
Only when the sub returns
can they access the images,
hoping against hope
for a glimpse of a wreck
When Franklin set sail in 1845,
he was aware that his ships
could be trapped in sea
ice for at least one winter
But in 1847, after two
years with no word,
Lady Jane Franklin put
pressure on the authorities
to start looking for her
husband and his crew
Rescue missions were
sent from Britain and America
And in 1850, near the entrance
to the Northwest Passage,
a joint search team
turned up the first clue
Graves
Of three sailors who had died
during Franklin's very
first winter in the Arctic
Even in the 1840s,
this many fatalities so early
in a mission was unusual
This shouldn't happen
Three men should not die
in the first winter of
an Arctic expedition
They've only been
out of Britain six months
What's killing them?
With Erebus and
Terror stuck in the ice,
these graves indicate
Franklin's expedition
spent their first winter
here at Beechey Island,
well north of the
modern search zone
Overwintering was
something they'd anticipated
Burying three of
their crew was not
One of the graves was marked
with a quote from the Bible
"Thus saith the Lord of
Hosts; consider your ways"
Puzzling
It's ominous
Has something gone wrong?
Do they sense that
something is going to go wrong
for the rest of the expedition?
Over a century later, in 1984,
archaeologists exhume the bodies
to try and work
out how they died
The corpses were
shockingly well-preserved
in the frozen ground
Tests revealed high levels
of lead in their systems
Lead was a common pollutant
in 19th-century England
But it could also
have come from piping
in the ship's water system,
or even from the solder
used to seal canned food
Innovations designed
to protect the men
from the rigors of the Arctic
But the tests didn't prove
that lead poisoning
was the cause of death,
so this clue only
deepened the mystery
In the search zone,
the Arctic Explorer has
scanned a few square miles
near the last position
of Erebus and Terror
recorded by the crew
Back on the ship, the
team downloads the data
to get their first glimpse
of the Arctic seafloor
As you can see,
there's not a lot of features
in this particular area
So, this is sterile completely
There's nothing, right?
Yeah
With no discoveries
in the first pass,
they're eager to press
on with the search
But there's a problem:
the ice, which had
briefly opened up, is back
As hard as it may be to believe,
this is somewhere in the Arctic
In parts of the Arctic,
this is as good as it's
going to get this year
Global warming means the amount
of summer sea ice in the Arctic
is in long-term decline
But from one year to the next,
the picture is far more complex
Just because there's a warming
trend due to global warming
doesn't mean that you
won't have variations
Modern-day ships can
still encounter difficult ice
because the
year-to-year variations
in this part of the world
can be just extreme
You can go from
no ice one summer
to completely landlocked ice,
where the ice goes from coast
to coast, in another summer
It's hard to predict
The Arctic has always been
an incredibly variable place
In 2014, unusually
extensive sea ice
is now threatening to shut
down the search here entirely
It's frustrating because
the team is so close
to the suspected last
location of Franklin's ships
But how do we know
these crucial coordinates?
After the discovery
of graves in 1850,
several more search
expeditions were sent to the Arctic
And in 1859, nearly 15
years after Franklin set sail,
the next tantalizing clue was
found on King William Island,
nearly 400 miles
south of the burial site
Here, in a stone cairn, men
of the Franklin expedition
had left a single,
handwritten note
The note, an incredible document
of the fate of the
Franklin crews
How can a piece of paper
hold fortune in its hands?
This is the most important
object that has been recovered
This precious piece
of the Franklin puzzle
is now held at the National
Maritime Museum in London
It was standard naval practice
to issue these kind of notes
with a standard blank form
that would be filled
in when necessary
The notes were then
placed in tubes like these
They could be just left
for people to find information
about the expedition
The note explains that
from Beechey Island,
the expedition sailed
over 350 miles south
to coordinates near the
coast of King William Island
Here, the men spent their
second winter in the Arctic,
and the message ends with
the upbeat words "all well"
But scrawled around the edge
of the note is another message,
written a whole year later
A shocking turn of events
that must have filled the
surviving men with despair
Franklin was dead
There's no mention
of how he died,
but the note goes on to say
that nine officers and 15
sailors had also passed away
Something was
going seriously wrong
The loss of any leader in
the middle of an expedition
isn't good news
Particularly so
when you're stranded
in the middle of nowhere
in a hostile environment
The captain of HMS
Terror, Francis Crozier,
was now in command,
and he had a problem
His note implies that
rather than breaking up,
the sea ice
remained frozen solid
throughout the summer of 1847
The ships were trapped,
and the men faced
yet another winter
stuck in the heart of the Arctic
So, why had the
ice failed to melt?
Climate scientists collect
and study ice core samples
to reconstruct past
weather conditions
During warm summers,
ice on the surface will melt,
leaving characteristic
pale bands in the core
But dark areas, lacking in
these distinct pale bands,
indicate times with
far colder summers
And ice core data shows
that the Franklin expedition
coincided with a period
of at least 30 years
with especially
frigid conditions
Based on the ice core record,
the Franklin era was
the least favorable
in terms of ice conditions
in the past 700 years
This period was unusually
cold, and so he really was unlucky
with the timing
of his expedition
Just an unfortunate
confluence of events,
and it's nothing that he
could have anticipated
Mother Nature had
dealt a cruel blow
But with the fate of 105
ailing men in his hands,
the note reveals
that Captain Crozier
decided to make his move
He ordered the men
to abandon the ships
and march south
toward Back's Fish River,
knowing that beyond there
was a British trading post
Setting off, they
faced a daunting trek
of over a thousand
miles to reach it
Exactly why he
attempted that journey
or whether he really
believed they could make it,
the note doesn't say
It is the most
enigmatic of clues
It's just enough to locate
them in the landscape
It's just enough to tell you
that something
terrible has happened
It's just enough to point you
in the right direction
to follow them
But there's so many
things that are not there
The coordinates
in Crozier's note
are the basis for the
team's northern search zone
But winds and currents mean
the ships could have ended up
anywhere within this huge area
And in 2014, sea ice has
plagued that area all summer
It's been a sort of
cat-and-mouse game
We feel like we have a break,
we feel like we have a shot,
and then the ice shifts
and the doors close
In a couple of weeks, these
seas could freeze over completely
Knowing that time is short,
the team sends up a
helicopter to find gaps in the ice
You can get to our
position right here
It's at least eight to
ten miles in open water
Actually, that's excellent
The good news is
that to the north of us,
there is a large opening
And this is right
where we want to be
It's right in the
primary search zone,
so essentially, we
have a shot here
We're waiting to launch
the first mission of the day
We're going to look at a first
block of four kilometers long
There we go
Now the waiting starts
Do you have a visual on it now?
But just an hour
into the search,
ice is spotted
drifting across the
Arctic explorers' path,
and the run is aborted
This morning, we had a window,
and very rapidly, that opening
closed on us from all sides
The ice is moving
quickly around us again,
capturing us, trapping us
The northern
search zone is huge,
and the ice makes
for slow progress
With time running short,
the team abandons this area
in favor of the southern zone,
where there's less ice
and some additional clues
The team began
looking here six years ago
based on eyewitness accounts
of the plight of Franklin's men
preserved by
Inuit oral tradition
Oral tradition is a
very important aspect
of Inuit culture and Inuit life
That's how we learn about
where to go and get the food,
or you may know about these
ice conditions in the springtime
Oral history had to
be very, very accurate,
because if it was not,
it could mean death
According to Inuit accounts,
expedition survivors
were spotted many times
as they marched south
Those sightings were later
passed on to search parties,
including one remarkable
story gathered in 1869
by American explorer
Charles Francis Hall
It describes a dramatic
face-to-face encounter
between the Inuit and
one group of Franklin's men
According to the story,
an officer walked forward,
shouting the Inuit
word for friend
Some believe this
was Captain Crozier,
who had learned some Inuit
words on a previous expedition
The Inuit provided seal
meat for his starving crew
But there was no way they
could support so many men,
so the Inuit left, knowing that
sharing any more of their food
would have been suicide
So the men continued
to march southward
According to Inuit accounts,
they dragged small
boats laden with supplies
If they stop, they die
So they walk and
they pick themselves up
and they try and head south,
pulling the ships'
boats behind them
The word "cold" as we know
it takes on a different meaning
You feel like you want
to roll up in a fetal ball
all the time
You become
inactive, weak-willed,
you don't want to do anything
other than sort of
creep into some place
where there's no
wind and no cold
It was a horrific ordeal
for the malnourished crew
But Hall's report
wasn't the first time
Inuit accounts of the
expedition had reached England
In 1854, the
explorer Sir John Rae
spent time with
another group of Inuit,
who described a
particularly grisly discovery
When the story was
reported in the British press,
all hell broke loose
So this is 1854
This is The Times,
October the 23rd,
and here's John Rae's
letter in all its gory detail
"The bodies of some 30
persons were discovered
"Some were in a tent,
others under the boat,
"which had been
turned to form a shelter
"From the mutilated state
of many of the corpses
"and from the
contents of the kettles,
"it is evident that our
wretched countrymen
"had been driven
to the last resource:
cannibalism as a means
of prolonging existence"
It's a horrendous,
horrific truth
for a Victorian public to hear
Heroes don't eat each
other, least of all naval heroes
To many in Britain, the stories
of cannibalism were an insult
And none other
than Charles Dickens
leapt to the men's defense
He dismissed the Inuit accounts
as "the chatter of a gross
handful of uncivilized people,
with a domesticity
of blood and blubber"
But in 1992, archaeologist
Anne Keenleyside
carried out extensive
research on bones
that had just been discovered
on the coast of
King William Island
Fragments of fabric and
buttons found with them
indicated that they were
members of Franklin's crew
This site map shows the
distribution of the bones
that we uncovered at the site
On this end of the site,
there is a scattering of bones
They're fairly widely scattered
And then, as we move
towards this end of the site,
you see a dense concentration
of bones in this area here
The first bone in which
I identified a cut mark
was a left pelvic bone
I turned it over, uncovered
it, lifted it up from the soil,
and found a distinct cut mark
clearly identifiable as a mark
that was not made by an animal
These kinds of
human-made cut marks
tend to have a
V-shaped cross-section,
depending on the
shape of the blade
These marks appear as though
they were made by metal knives
used to strip flesh
from human bones
in a last desperate
bid to survive
It seemed to corroborate the
Inuit accounts of cannibalism
In its disgust,
19th-century Britain
had rejected those
stories as unreliable folklore
But in doing so, they'd also
overlooked important clues
to the whereabouts of HMS
Erebus and HMS Terror.
The Inuit told explorers
that one of Franklin's ships
was crushed by the ice
before sinking off
King William Island
But oral traditions
also preserve clues
about the fate of
the second ship,
which supposedly remained intact
Could this information help
to narrow down the search?
Here on modern-day
King William Island,
Louie Kamookak has spent
30 years compiling information
passed down through
the generations
He discovered clues
embedded in Inuit culture itself
With the elders involved,
we collected all the
place names in this region
because place name is one
way oral history is passed down
Oral history is passed down
by speaking, telling stories,
but it's also in the place names
There's places like,
past Simpson Strait,
a Boat Place
That's the story where
one of the ships was
when it was still afloat
That's why it
called a Boat Place
This "Boat Place" is found
well south of
King William Island
Based on that and
other Inuit accounts,
Parks Canada has drawn
up its southern search zone
And with the north
blocked by ice,
all efforts are now focused here
So, what do we have?
A detailed oral history
that really, you know, helps
us define where to start looking
It were not for information
provided by the Inuit,
we would have no reason to
start looking for Franklin's ships
down in the Wilmott
and Crampton Bay
Teams from Parks Canada and
the Arctic Research Foundation
have scoured the seafloor
here in recent years
And that work continues
now, using towed sonar units
That's the safety
cable for the sonar
We don't want to lose it
The data comes in live,
so team members keep
their eyes glued to the screens
Winter is coming, and their
search window will soon close
But just as hopes
are beginning to fade,
exciting news comes from
a different source entirely
For many years, a separate team
led by anthropologist
Doug Stenton
has also been looking
for clues on land
In 2014, they're
combing small islands
in the southern search zone
for evidence of Franklin's men
And on September 1,
it's helicopter pilot
Andrew Sterling
who makes a stunning find
Just walking on the beach,
sort of something
caught my eye at the side
and it just looked out of
place, the color behind a rock,
so I just went over
to investigate it
Could this be the breakthrough
the team has been hoping for?
We all looked at it and
went, "Well, this is from a ship"
We didn't know what it was
We're not marine
archaeologists, per se,
but we all thought
this just has that
you know, we all just sensed it
The object is stamped
with characteristic marks
known as broad arrows,
signifying British
Royal Navy property
It was just unmistakable,
what the significance was
An indisputable indication that
this came from a Royal Navy ship
and undeniably from
either Erebus or Terror.
The object is quickly
identified from the ship's plans
as the metal fitting
that supports one
of the ship's cranes
And it was found in the heart
of the southern search area,
close to the Inuit sightings
This large iron object,
very close to where
the Inuit report
that they encountered
one of these ships
To find this in that vicinity
is very, very exciting,
and it really told us
that we were barking
up the right tree
At last, it all seems
to be coming together
This find is the most
important discovery
since the cairn note
over 150 years ago
Are they finally on the verge
of solving the Franklin puzzle?
With winter approaching
and their search
window closing fast,
the Parks Canada team
scrambles to scan the
surrounding seafloor
My colleague and I were
manning the side-scan sonar station
We were both looking
at the sonar monitor,
and there it comes
And you have this really
unmistakable outline
of a shipwreck
No doubt what it was
Started to scroll
down the monitor
And it wasn't even
halfway onto the screen
before you really knew
what you were looking at
Jabbed my finger
right at the screen
and kind of lunged
for it and said,
"That's it, that's it!"
When I saw the image
of the ship coming down, I just
it cut my legs, literally
"Oh, my God, this is going to
be a treasure trove of information,
"and we are going to
really open up a window
directly into history"
It's a pivotal moment
in the Franklin story
Thanks to the Inuit oral history
and, ironically, to the
ice that forced them south,
the team has finally located
one of Franklin's long-lost ships
This is a great
moment for exploration
We've been searching
for, you know, 160 years
for answers to what happened
to the Franklin expedition
The best equipped, most finely
prepared and trained expedition
that had ever set out for
the Northwest Passage,
and to have it
literally obliterated,
end in mass disaster,
no survivors and no ships,
it's been a confounding mystery
To finally have
something significant,
to finally have a
ship, is just incredible
I've spent most of my adult
life dreaming of this day,
and, you know, it's here
Scientists have
located one of the ships
from the fabled
Franklin expedition
found one of two ships
used to search for
the Northwest Passage
teams have finally
hit the jackpot
So an absolutely incredible
day for those people,
some of whom have
spent, you know,
a good chunk
of their life's work
For underwater archaeologists
Marc-André Bernier
and Ryan Harris,
it's the find of a lifetime
But they're desperate
for a closer look,
so before the seas
freeze for another winter,
they dive down to see
the ship with their own eyes
I'd caught a glimpse of
the timber on the seafloor
Followed along its length
Just growing in
anticipation and excitement,
and then, you know, boom!
Towering overhead,
out of the haze,
loomed the bulk of
this stately shipwreck
a full five meters tall
That sensation of
finally laying a hand
on the side of this
storied shipwreck
is quite a remarkable
experience that I'll never forget
The wreck lies just 36
feet below the surface,
but murky water and
piles of broken planks
make it difficult to see
Among the timbers, a
familiar shape catches the eye
Is that a gun?
It's a cannon
Incredible!
Is that two of them?
Yeah
There's so much to
see, it boggles the mind
Directly over the wreck, the
Canadian Hydrographic Service
carries out more sonar work
to create a virtual
image of the entire site
The masts have been
swept away by drifting sea ice,
but the hull of the
ship is in one piece
Holes in the deck
even allow the divers
to get their first
look inside the ship
And you could look forward
and see murky features
Just an incredible
sensation of being inside
That's where they would have
spent long, harrowing winters
through the dark Arctic nights
It's just an absolutely
remarkable sight,
and the fact that
it still stands intact,
it allows you to sort
of place yourself there
You feel this
connection with the past
It's really quite astonishing
To cap it all off,
there is one last prize
And I hear John call over
on the headset, saying,
"You're not going to believe
this, but I found the bell"
And I thought I must
have misheard him,
but sure enough, I went over
and there was the ship's bell,
lying in plain sight, right
on top of the upper deck
Embossed on the side is the
year that Franklin set sail: 1845
A poignant reminder
of the terrible events
that played out on
this ship 170 years ago
Today was an extraordinary day
I've never had the like
of it in my entire career,
and I probably never
will after this day
This wreck site without a doubt
is one of the most extraordinary
things I've ever laid eyes on
It is absolutely an underwater
archaeologist's dream
To identify which
ship they've found,
the team takes measurements
from the high-resolution
sonar data
This image here kind of shows
a good perspective
for extracting length
measurements
According to the 1845 plans
from the National
Maritime Museum,
the dimensions of
Erebus and Terror
were subtly different
Carefully comparing the
sonar image with the plans,
only one of the ships
is a perfect match
The wreck must be HMS
Erebus, Franklin's flagship
The sonar data
is used to produce
this three-dimensional
reconstruction
The wreck will be
explored in great detail
in years to come,
but it's already produced
an extraordinary idea
that could rewrite the
history of Franklin's expedition
Both ships were originally
thought to have been abandoned
off King William Island,
much further north,
so how did Erebus move
100 miles to the south?
So where the wreck
of Erebus is found,
it actually happens
to be protected,
almost surrounded by a
barrier of small islands and islets
What we ask ourselves
is how this ship
arrived at that location
Satellite imagery from
the Canadian Ice Service
shows that ice in this area
tends to drift
south with the wind
Could this have
carried Erebus south?
Or might there be
another explanation?
You see the tendril of ice
coming down the
bottom of the screen,
and that's being expelled
into the Queen Maud Gulf
So it's not terribly surprising
that at least one of the ships
ultimately would
have been directed
towards Wilmott and Crampton Bay
What is less clear, however, is
how it could have gotten through
this tangled web of
small islands and shoals,
how it worked itself
into a protective pocket
of where we find it today
Harris and Bernier
believe it's unlikely
that the ice could
drag a ship intact
through the maze
of reefs and shoals
But there is a
more plausible idea
suggested by a further
clue in the Inuit accounts
When Erebus was
last seen above water,
smoke was rising from the
ship as if it were inhabited
Had some of the crew
returned to the ship
from their attempted
march south,
and could they have steered
her to where she now lies?
It's a possibility that
might rewrite the history
of the expedition
The ships had already navigated
through a significant stretch
of the Northwest Passage
to reach King William Island,
but the wreck lies
close to the mainland,
where the coast had
already been surveyed
by previous expeditions
coming from the west
So if survivors did
pilot Erebus to this spot,
they had bridged
the gap on the charts
and completed the
goal of their mission
Now these men, that
last surviving band,
a final fire before
the flame goes out
These men have, in effect,
completed the final link
in the chain of the
Northwest Passage
But that is so far from
their minds at that moment
These men are thinking
nothing of fame or records
They're thinking
of the following day
Inuit accounts
mention a few sets
of what they called white
men's footsteps heading inland
A last trace of the
remaining souls
In navigating the ship
to where it now lies,
those men may have
found the final link
of the elusive Northwest Passage
Whether they succeeded or not,
the wreck of HMS Erebus
is a monument to exploration
and to the sacrifice
of all 129 men
of Franklin's lost expedition
expedition of its day
In 1845, British
explorer Sir John Franklin
heads into the frozen
wilderness of the Arctic
to conquer the fabled
shortcut to the Orient:
the Northwest Passage
But this grand expedition
would never return home
There is no story in the
history of British exploration
that ends as tragically as this
129 men disappear
off the face of the earth
Again and again,
searchers ventured
into this icy wasteland,
an effort that
continues to this day
Over time, a meager
trail of clues emerged
Hints of illness, starvation,
even cannibalism
But no sign of
Franklin's two ships
What happened to them?
This maddening mystery has
remained unsolved for 170 years
But now, archaeologists
are mounting
a far-reaching modern
search for Franklin's lost ships
Ships don't just disappear
If there is a Franklin
expedition ship,
we will find that ship
Combining
21st-century technology
with previously dismissed
eyewitness accounts,
they make an astonishing find
Jabbed my finger
right at the screen
and kind of lunged
for it and said,
"That's it, that's it!"
This amazing
journey into the Arctic
could solve a mystery
170 years in the making
and rewrite the
history of exploration
Search for the "Arctic Ghost
Ship," right now on NOVA.
The Canadian Arctic
As the summer of
2014 comes to an end
the ice is closing in
Working from icebreakers,
a team of wreck hunters
is scouring the ocean floor
with their sonar equipment
They're searching for two ships
believed to have sunk
in these frozen waters
in the 19th century
This high-tech
mission is only the latest
in a long history
of failed attempts
to solve a perplexing mystery
What happened to the British
explorer Sir John Franklin
and his crew of 128 fine sailors
when they sailed two
heavily fortified ships
into this Arctic wasteland
and then vanished off
the face of the earth?
That question has gone
unanswered for 170 years
And now, after
weeks of searching,
yet another effort,
like all those before it,
seems on the verge of failure
Are you worried about
that ice coming in?
That's not good
In just days, these seas
could freeze over completely
Are you going to stop it?
Yeah
So, let's head back
towards the ship
Their window is closing
The mystery has
its origins in 1845,
as two great ships leave
England on a historic quest
to map the fabled
Northwest Passage
European traders
had long understood
that the most direct route
to the Orient lay to the west,
if only they could find a
way over the Americas
Why not go over the top?
The world narrows as you go up
Go across the top
of North America
And so the idea was to find
what they called the
Northwest Passage
The approaches from
both the Atlantic and Pacific
were already surveyed
But in between, the charts
showed a mysterious gap,
an area that had defied
explorers for centuries
So in 1845, Sir John Franklin
set out to find once and for all
whether the gap could be bridged
and to claim the passage
for the British Empire
The fact that there's an
empty space on the chart,
a terra incognita,
that's both appealing,
but also an insult
to the British Navy
They need to fill in
the lines on the map
There's power in the ink
lines that are drawn on charts
It's ownership
It's sovereignty
It's politics
To conquer the
Northwest Passage,
the Navy put together
the best equipped
Arctic expedition
there had ever been
Sir John Franklin, a
veteran of the Arctic,
was chosen to lead
Sir John Franklin was
one of the two or three
outstanding polar navigators
of the first half of
the 19th century
He combined experience,
scientific expertise,
and a proven track
record as a leader of men
59-year-old Franklin had led
two previous Arctic expeditions
to survey the coastline of
the North American mainland
During one trip,
when supplies ran low,
the crew had to eat
anything they could to survive,
and Franklin became
affectionately known
as "the man who
ate his own boots"
This time, he was
better prepared
He and his crew of 128 men
sailed on two specially
adapted former warships:
HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
These young men had
left behind their loved ones
in pursuit of the greatest
prize in Arctic exploration
They knew the ships
would encounter ice,
so the hulls were
strengthened with oak planking
up to eight feet thick and
reinforced with iron plate
Plans from the National
Maritime Museum in London
show they were also
fitted with innovations
such as coal-powered
steam propulsion,
a retractable propeller,
and even central heating
The ships were stocked with
three years of food rations,
a library,
even musical instruments
to help pass the time
They were better equipped
than any previous expedition
But how prepared
could they really be
for a world about which
they knew so little?
It was very much
the dark side of the moon
as far as the Victorians
were concerned
It was somewhere
that had fascinated men
for hundreds of years,
but they'd never
mastered the environment
In July 1845, a whaling
ship recorded a final sighting
of the expedition in Baffin
Bay, west of Greenland
From there, they
sailed into oblivion
In the 170 years since then,
despite scores of
well-equipped search attempts,
only a few meager
clues have been found,
and no trace of the ships
In 2014, a crack
team of wreck hunters
embarks on a fresh search
Writer and historian John Geiger
has been obsessed with
the mystery for decades
To him, this is a
once-in-a-lifetime chance
to lay the ghosts of the
Franklin expedition to rest
Been involved in one way
or another with Franklin
since my 20s
It's the greatest mystery
in exploration history
There's nothing
that compares with it
It's really important from
a historical standpoint
to understand what
happened to them
Only by finding the wrecks
can crucial questions
be answered
Exactly why did
the expedition fail?
And how far through the
Northwest Passage did they get?
It won't be easy
The wrecks remain lost,
largely because
searching these icy waters
is such a difficult
and dangerous task
In recent years, the government
of Canada and its partners
have mounted
several expeditions,
deploying icebreakers
and sonar equipment
to hunt down the wrecks
But these costly missions
have another purpose
As global warming melts the ice,
interest in extracting the
Arctic's natural resources
will likely grow
These surveys will allow
safer navigation here
in the years to come
These vessels host
a diverse taskforce
led by the underwater
archaeology team
of Parks Canada
This is actually our
sixth field season
searching for
Franklin's lost ships
We're hoping that there's
going to be a payday
down the road here
Despite the calm exterior,
the team is desperate
for a breakthrough
In the last six years,
they've searched
close to 500 square miles
of seafloor and found nothing
They have two key search zones
One, in the north,
is based on clues found
by earlier search parties
Further south, a second zone
is based on sightings of a ship
preserved in the oral history
of local Inuit populations
But even after six years,
there's still a huge
area to search
In the north, sea ice often
lingers through the summer,
so plenty of this area
remains unsurveyed
This year, they
hope to put that right
We're looking in the very place
where Erebus and
Terror were last reported
by the men who
sailed those ships
You know, if you lose your keys,
you generally go
back and look for them
in the last place you
remember seeing them
By combining the last
known position of the ships
with information on
prevailing currents,
the team has drawn up
a northern search zone
of some 540 square miles
So how will they search such
a huge expanse of seafloor
during the brief Arctic summer?
This year, for the first time,
they have a secret weapon
It's basically an
unmanned torpedo
that we can deploy
pre-programmed
and it will literally
go out in the sea,
follow the route that
we've asked it to follow,
gather data, and come
back with that data
This is the Arctic Explorer,
a precision piece
of military hardware
that uses sonar to scan
a square mile of seafloor
in just an hour
The sonar itself,
which is an acoustic system,
that will send a signal to
the bottom and recapture it
to give a picture of
what's on the bottom
It produces images like this,
showing the seafloor
in incredible detail
Any sign of a ship would
show up immediately
But if there's any hint of
ice, the team will have to pull
this delicate instrument
out of the water
The last thing they need
is to lose their
best search vehicle
For the first two
weeks of the search,
drifting ice floes
have prevented them
from deploying
the Arctic Explorer
But their luck may
be about to change
We're seeing a growing
surface area of open water
A small window in the
ice is an opportunity
to deploy the Arctic
Explorer for the first time
It's a risk,
but just one pass could
be enough to reveal a wreck
It looks like we should
try to get into action
Wary of rogue ice floes,
the team will track
the submersible
every step of the way
For several hours, it will track
up and down the search zone,
scanning an area
of a few square miles
Only when the sub returns
can they access the images,
hoping against hope
for a glimpse of a wreck
When Franklin set sail in 1845,
he was aware that his ships
could be trapped in sea
ice for at least one winter
But in 1847, after two
years with no word,
Lady Jane Franklin put
pressure on the authorities
to start looking for her
husband and his crew
Rescue missions were
sent from Britain and America
And in 1850, near the entrance
to the Northwest Passage,
a joint search team
turned up the first clue
Graves
Of three sailors who had died
during Franklin's very
first winter in the Arctic
Even in the 1840s,
this many fatalities so early
in a mission was unusual
This shouldn't happen
Three men should not die
in the first winter of
an Arctic expedition
They've only been
out of Britain six months
What's killing them?
With Erebus and
Terror stuck in the ice,
these graves indicate
Franklin's expedition
spent their first winter
here at Beechey Island,
well north of the
modern search zone
Overwintering was
something they'd anticipated
Burying three of
their crew was not
One of the graves was marked
with a quote from the Bible
"Thus saith the Lord of
Hosts; consider your ways"
Puzzling
It's ominous
Has something gone wrong?
Do they sense that
something is going to go wrong
for the rest of the expedition?
Over a century later, in 1984,
archaeologists exhume the bodies
to try and work
out how they died
The corpses were
shockingly well-preserved
in the frozen ground
Tests revealed high levels
of lead in their systems
Lead was a common pollutant
in 19th-century England
But it could also
have come from piping
in the ship's water system,
or even from the solder
used to seal canned food
Innovations designed
to protect the men
from the rigors of the Arctic
But the tests didn't prove
that lead poisoning
was the cause of death,
so this clue only
deepened the mystery
In the search zone,
the Arctic Explorer has
scanned a few square miles
near the last position
of Erebus and Terror
recorded by the crew
Back on the ship, the
team downloads the data
to get their first glimpse
of the Arctic seafloor
As you can see,
there's not a lot of features
in this particular area
So, this is sterile completely
There's nothing, right?
Yeah
With no discoveries
in the first pass,
they're eager to press
on with the search
But there's a problem:
the ice, which had
briefly opened up, is back
As hard as it may be to believe,
this is somewhere in the Arctic
In parts of the Arctic,
this is as good as it's
going to get this year
Global warming means the amount
of summer sea ice in the Arctic
is in long-term decline
But from one year to the next,
the picture is far more complex
Just because there's a warming
trend due to global warming
doesn't mean that you
won't have variations
Modern-day ships can
still encounter difficult ice
because the
year-to-year variations
in this part of the world
can be just extreme
You can go from
no ice one summer
to completely landlocked ice,
where the ice goes from coast
to coast, in another summer
It's hard to predict
The Arctic has always been
an incredibly variable place
In 2014, unusually
extensive sea ice
is now threatening to shut
down the search here entirely
It's frustrating because
the team is so close
to the suspected last
location of Franklin's ships
But how do we know
these crucial coordinates?
After the discovery
of graves in 1850,
several more search
expeditions were sent to the Arctic
And in 1859, nearly 15
years after Franklin set sail,
the next tantalizing clue was
found on King William Island,
nearly 400 miles
south of the burial site
Here, in a stone cairn, men
of the Franklin expedition
had left a single,
handwritten note
The note, an incredible document
of the fate of the
Franklin crews
How can a piece of paper
hold fortune in its hands?
This is the most important
object that has been recovered
This precious piece
of the Franklin puzzle
is now held at the National
Maritime Museum in London
It was standard naval practice
to issue these kind of notes
with a standard blank form
that would be filled
in when necessary
The notes were then
placed in tubes like these
They could be just left
for people to find information
about the expedition
The note explains that
from Beechey Island,
the expedition sailed
over 350 miles south
to coordinates near the
coast of King William Island
Here, the men spent their
second winter in the Arctic,
and the message ends with
the upbeat words "all well"
But scrawled around the edge
of the note is another message,
written a whole year later
A shocking turn of events
that must have filled the
surviving men with despair
Franklin was dead
There's no mention
of how he died,
but the note goes on to say
that nine officers and 15
sailors had also passed away
Something was
going seriously wrong
The loss of any leader in
the middle of an expedition
isn't good news
Particularly so
when you're stranded
in the middle of nowhere
in a hostile environment
The captain of HMS
Terror, Francis Crozier,
was now in command,
and he had a problem
His note implies that
rather than breaking up,
the sea ice
remained frozen solid
throughout the summer of 1847
The ships were trapped,
and the men faced
yet another winter
stuck in the heart of the Arctic
So, why had the
ice failed to melt?
Climate scientists collect
and study ice core samples
to reconstruct past
weather conditions
During warm summers,
ice on the surface will melt,
leaving characteristic
pale bands in the core
But dark areas, lacking in
these distinct pale bands,
indicate times with
far colder summers
And ice core data shows
that the Franklin expedition
coincided with a period
of at least 30 years
with especially
frigid conditions
Based on the ice core record,
the Franklin era was
the least favorable
in terms of ice conditions
in the past 700 years
This period was unusually
cold, and so he really was unlucky
with the timing
of his expedition
Just an unfortunate
confluence of events,
and it's nothing that he
could have anticipated
Mother Nature had
dealt a cruel blow
But with the fate of 105
ailing men in his hands,
the note reveals
that Captain Crozier
decided to make his move
He ordered the men
to abandon the ships
and march south
toward Back's Fish River,
knowing that beyond there
was a British trading post
Setting off, they
faced a daunting trek
of over a thousand
miles to reach it
Exactly why he
attempted that journey
or whether he really
believed they could make it,
the note doesn't say
It is the most
enigmatic of clues
It's just enough to locate
them in the landscape
It's just enough to tell you
that something
terrible has happened
It's just enough to point you
in the right direction
to follow them
But there's so many
things that are not there
The coordinates
in Crozier's note
are the basis for the
team's northern search zone
But winds and currents mean
the ships could have ended up
anywhere within this huge area
And in 2014, sea ice has
plagued that area all summer
It's been a sort of
cat-and-mouse game
We feel like we have a break,
we feel like we have a shot,
and then the ice shifts
and the doors close
In a couple of weeks, these
seas could freeze over completely
Knowing that time is short,
the team sends up a
helicopter to find gaps in the ice
You can get to our
position right here
It's at least eight to
ten miles in open water
Actually, that's excellent
The good news is
that to the north of us,
there is a large opening
And this is right
where we want to be
It's right in the
primary search zone,
so essentially, we
have a shot here
We're waiting to launch
the first mission of the day
We're going to look at a first
block of four kilometers long
There we go
Now the waiting starts
Do you have a visual on it now?
But just an hour
into the search,
ice is spotted
drifting across the
Arctic explorers' path,
and the run is aborted
This morning, we had a window,
and very rapidly, that opening
closed on us from all sides
The ice is moving
quickly around us again,
capturing us, trapping us
The northern
search zone is huge,
and the ice makes
for slow progress
With time running short,
the team abandons this area
in favor of the southern zone,
where there's less ice
and some additional clues
The team began
looking here six years ago
based on eyewitness accounts
of the plight of Franklin's men
preserved by
Inuit oral tradition
Oral tradition is a
very important aspect
of Inuit culture and Inuit life
That's how we learn about
where to go and get the food,
or you may know about these
ice conditions in the springtime
Oral history had to
be very, very accurate,
because if it was not,
it could mean death
According to Inuit accounts,
expedition survivors
were spotted many times
as they marched south
Those sightings were later
passed on to search parties,
including one remarkable
story gathered in 1869
by American explorer
Charles Francis Hall
It describes a dramatic
face-to-face encounter
between the Inuit and
one group of Franklin's men
According to the story,
an officer walked forward,
shouting the Inuit
word for friend
Some believe this
was Captain Crozier,
who had learned some Inuit
words on a previous expedition
The Inuit provided seal
meat for his starving crew
But there was no way they
could support so many men,
so the Inuit left, knowing that
sharing any more of their food
would have been suicide
So the men continued
to march southward
According to Inuit accounts,
they dragged small
boats laden with supplies
If they stop, they die
So they walk and
they pick themselves up
and they try and head south,
pulling the ships'
boats behind them
The word "cold" as we know
it takes on a different meaning
You feel like you want
to roll up in a fetal ball
all the time
You become
inactive, weak-willed,
you don't want to do anything
other than sort of
creep into some place
where there's no
wind and no cold
It was a horrific ordeal
for the malnourished crew
But Hall's report
wasn't the first time
Inuit accounts of the
expedition had reached England
In 1854, the
explorer Sir John Rae
spent time with
another group of Inuit,
who described a
particularly grisly discovery
When the story was
reported in the British press,
all hell broke loose
So this is 1854
This is The Times,
October the 23rd,
and here's John Rae's
letter in all its gory detail
"The bodies of some 30
persons were discovered
"Some were in a tent,
others under the boat,
"which had been
turned to form a shelter
"From the mutilated state
of many of the corpses
"and from the
contents of the kettles,
"it is evident that our
wretched countrymen
"had been driven
to the last resource:
cannibalism as a means
of prolonging existence"
It's a horrendous,
horrific truth
for a Victorian public to hear
Heroes don't eat each
other, least of all naval heroes
To many in Britain, the stories
of cannibalism were an insult
And none other
than Charles Dickens
leapt to the men's defense
He dismissed the Inuit accounts
as "the chatter of a gross
handful of uncivilized people,
with a domesticity
of blood and blubber"
But in 1992, archaeologist
Anne Keenleyside
carried out extensive
research on bones
that had just been discovered
on the coast of
King William Island
Fragments of fabric and
buttons found with them
indicated that they were
members of Franklin's crew
This site map shows the
distribution of the bones
that we uncovered at the site
On this end of the site,
there is a scattering of bones
They're fairly widely scattered
And then, as we move
towards this end of the site,
you see a dense concentration
of bones in this area here
The first bone in which
I identified a cut mark
was a left pelvic bone
I turned it over, uncovered
it, lifted it up from the soil,
and found a distinct cut mark
clearly identifiable as a mark
that was not made by an animal
These kinds of
human-made cut marks
tend to have a
V-shaped cross-section,
depending on the
shape of the blade
These marks appear as though
they were made by metal knives
used to strip flesh
from human bones
in a last desperate
bid to survive
It seemed to corroborate the
Inuit accounts of cannibalism
In its disgust,
19th-century Britain
had rejected those
stories as unreliable folklore
But in doing so, they'd also
overlooked important clues
to the whereabouts of HMS
Erebus and HMS Terror.
The Inuit told explorers
that one of Franklin's ships
was crushed by the ice
before sinking off
King William Island
But oral traditions
also preserve clues
about the fate of
the second ship,
which supposedly remained intact
Could this information help
to narrow down the search?
Here on modern-day
King William Island,
Louie Kamookak has spent
30 years compiling information
passed down through
the generations
He discovered clues
embedded in Inuit culture itself
With the elders involved,
we collected all the
place names in this region
because place name is one
way oral history is passed down
Oral history is passed down
by speaking, telling stories,
but it's also in the place names
There's places like,
past Simpson Strait,
a Boat Place
That's the story where
one of the ships was
when it was still afloat
That's why it
called a Boat Place
This "Boat Place" is found
well south of
King William Island
Based on that and
other Inuit accounts,
Parks Canada has drawn
up its southern search zone
And with the north
blocked by ice,
all efforts are now focused here
So, what do we have?
A detailed oral history
that really, you know, helps
us define where to start looking
It were not for information
provided by the Inuit,
we would have no reason to
start looking for Franklin's ships
down in the Wilmott
and Crampton Bay
Teams from Parks Canada and
the Arctic Research Foundation
have scoured the seafloor
here in recent years
And that work continues
now, using towed sonar units
That's the safety
cable for the sonar
We don't want to lose it
The data comes in live,
so team members keep
their eyes glued to the screens
Winter is coming, and their
search window will soon close
But just as hopes
are beginning to fade,
exciting news comes from
a different source entirely
For many years, a separate team
led by anthropologist
Doug Stenton
has also been looking
for clues on land
In 2014, they're
combing small islands
in the southern search zone
for evidence of Franklin's men
And on September 1,
it's helicopter pilot
Andrew Sterling
who makes a stunning find
Just walking on the beach,
sort of something
caught my eye at the side
and it just looked out of
place, the color behind a rock,
so I just went over
to investigate it
Could this be the breakthrough
the team has been hoping for?
We all looked at it and
went, "Well, this is from a ship"
We didn't know what it was
We're not marine
archaeologists, per se,
but we all thought
this just has that
you know, we all just sensed it
The object is stamped
with characteristic marks
known as broad arrows,
signifying British
Royal Navy property
It was just unmistakable,
what the significance was
An indisputable indication that
this came from a Royal Navy ship
and undeniably from
either Erebus or Terror.
The object is quickly
identified from the ship's plans
as the metal fitting
that supports one
of the ship's cranes
And it was found in the heart
of the southern search area,
close to the Inuit sightings
This large iron object,
very close to where
the Inuit report
that they encountered
one of these ships
To find this in that vicinity
is very, very exciting,
and it really told us
that we were barking
up the right tree
At last, it all seems
to be coming together
This find is the most
important discovery
since the cairn note
over 150 years ago
Are they finally on the verge
of solving the Franklin puzzle?
With winter approaching
and their search
window closing fast,
the Parks Canada team
scrambles to scan the
surrounding seafloor
My colleague and I were
manning the side-scan sonar station
We were both looking
at the sonar monitor,
and there it comes
And you have this really
unmistakable outline
of a shipwreck
No doubt what it was
Started to scroll
down the monitor
And it wasn't even
halfway onto the screen
before you really knew
what you were looking at
Jabbed my finger
right at the screen
and kind of lunged
for it and said,
"That's it, that's it!"
When I saw the image
of the ship coming down, I just
it cut my legs, literally
"Oh, my God, this is going to
be a treasure trove of information,
"and we are going to
really open up a window
directly into history"
It's a pivotal moment
in the Franklin story
Thanks to the Inuit oral history
and, ironically, to the
ice that forced them south,
the team has finally located
one of Franklin's long-lost ships
This is a great
moment for exploration
We've been searching
for, you know, 160 years
for answers to what happened
to the Franklin expedition
The best equipped, most finely
prepared and trained expedition
that had ever set out for
the Northwest Passage,
and to have it
literally obliterated,
end in mass disaster,
no survivors and no ships,
it's been a confounding mystery
To finally have
something significant,
to finally have a
ship, is just incredible
I've spent most of my adult
life dreaming of this day,
and, you know, it's here
Scientists have
located one of the ships
from the fabled
Franklin expedition
found one of two ships
used to search for
the Northwest Passage
teams have finally
hit the jackpot
So an absolutely incredible
day for those people,
some of whom have
spent, you know,
a good chunk
of their life's work
For underwater archaeologists
Marc-André Bernier
and Ryan Harris,
it's the find of a lifetime
But they're desperate
for a closer look,
so before the seas
freeze for another winter,
they dive down to see
the ship with their own eyes
I'd caught a glimpse of
the timber on the seafloor
Followed along its length
Just growing in
anticipation and excitement,
and then, you know, boom!
Towering overhead,
out of the haze,
loomed the bulk of
this stately shipwreck
a full five meters tall
That sensation of
finally laying a hand
on the side of this
storied shipwreck
is quite a remarkable
experience that I'll never forget
The wreck lies just 36
feet below the surface,
but murky water and
piles of broken planks
make it difficult to see
Among the timbers, a
familiar shape catches the eye
Is that a gun?
It's a cannon
Incredible!
Is that two of them?
Yeah
There's so much to
see, it boggles the mind
Directly over the wreck, the
Canadian Hydrographic Service
carries out more sonar work
to create a virtual
image of the entire site
The masts have been
swept away by drifting sea ice,
but the hull of the
ship is in one piece
Holes in the deck
even allow the divers
to get their first
look inside the ship
And you could look forward
and see murky features
Just an incredible
sensation of being inside
That's where they would have
spent long, harrowing winters
through the dark Arctic nights
It's just an absolutely
remarkable sight,
and the fact that
it still stands intact,
it allows you to sort
of place yourself there
You feel this
connection with the past
It's really quite astonishing
To cap it all off,
there is one last prize
And I hear John call over
on the headset, saying,
"You're not going to believe
this, but I found the bell"
And I thought I must
have misheard him,
but sure enough, I went over
and there was the ship's bell,
lying in plain sight, right
on top of the upper deck
Embossed on the side is the
year that Franklin set sail: 1845
A poignant reminder
of the terrible events
that played out on
this ship 170 years ago
Today was an extraordinary day
I've never had the like
of it in my entire career,
and I probably never
will after this day
This wreck site without a doubt
is one of the most extraordinary
things I've ever laid eyes on
It is absolutely an underwater
archaeologist's dream
To identify which
ship they've found,
the team takes measurements
from the high-resolution
sonar data
This image here kind of shows
a good perspective
for extracting length
measurements
According to the 1845 plans
from the National
Maritime Museum,
the dimensions of
Erebus and Terror
were subtly different
Carefully comparing the
sonar image with the plans,
only one of the ships
is a perfect match
The wreck must be HMS
Erebus, Franklin's flagship
The sonar data
is used to produce
this three-dimensional
reconstruction
The wreck will be
explored in great detail
in years to come,
but it's already produced
an extraordinary idea
that could rewrite the
history of Franklin's expedition
Both ships were originally
thought to have been abandoned
off King William Island,
much further north,
so how did Erebus move
100 miles to the south?
So where the wreck
of Erebus is found,
it actually happens
to be protected,
almost surrounded by a
barrier of small islands and islets
What we ask ourselves
is how this ship
arrived at that location
Satellite imagery from
the Canadian Ice Service
shows that ice in this area
tends to drift
south with the wind
Could this have
carried Erebus south?
Or might there be
another explanation?
You see the tendril of ice
coming down the
bottom of the screen,
and that's being expelled
into the Queen Maud Gulf
So it's not terribly surprising
that at least one of the ships
ultimately would
have been directed
towards Wilmott and Crampton Bay
What is less clear, however, is
how it could have gotten through
this tangled web of
small islands and shoals,
how it worked itself
into a protective pocket
of where we find it today
Harris and Bernier
believe it's unlikely
that the ice could
drag a ship intact
through the maze
of reefs and shoals
But there is a
more plausible idea
suggested by a further
clue in the Inuit accounts
When Erebus was
last seen above water,
smoke was rising from the
ship as if it were inhabited
Had some of the crew
returned to the ship
from their attempted
march south,
and could they have steered
her to where she now lies?
It's a possibility that
might rewrite the history
of the expedition
The ships had already navigated
through a significant stretch
of the Northwest Passage
to reach King William Island,
but the wreck lies
close to the mainland,
where the coast had
already been surveyed
by previous expeditions
coming from the west
So if survivors did
pilot Erebus to this spot,
they had bridged
the gap on the charts
and completed the
goal of their mission
Now these men, that
last surviving band,
a final fire before
the flame goes out
These men have, in effect,
completed the final link
in the chain of the
Northwest Passage
But that is so far from
their minds at that moment
These men are thinking
nothing of fame or records
They're thinking
of the following day
Inuit accounts
mention a few sets
of what they called white
men's footsteps heading inland
A last trace of the
remaining souls
In navigating the ship
to where it now lies,
those men may have
found the final link
of the elusive Northwest Passage
Whether they succeeded or not,
the wreck of HMS Erebus
is a monument to exploration
and to the sacrifice
of all 129 men
of Franklin's lost expedition