After 169 Years, Canada finds the remains of 2 missing explorer ships

The fate of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, two British ships lost at sea while searching for the Northwest Passage, has been a mystery that has baffled Naval historians for more than 160 years.

The two ships, along with their captains and 129 men, were last seen sailing north of Canada in July 1845. It is believed the doomed boats became trapped in sea ice, and that the crew may even have resorted to cannibalism to stay alive, but their exact fate has remained unknown, until now.

Yesterday the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that underwater drones using sonar had located one of the two boats at the bottom of the Victoria Strait, near King William Island, Nunavut.

He added: 'Finding the first vessel will no doubt provide the momentum – or wind in our sails – necessary to locate its sister ship and find out even more about what happened to the Franklin Expedition’s crew.'

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were heavily-armoured bomb ships, and two years before the mission to the Northwest Passage, they had taken an expedition captained by James Clark Ross to the Antarctic.

Despite his experience in exploring polar waters, Ross turned down the latest mission, viewing it as too dangerous, so instead the command of Erebus passed to Sir John Franklin with Terror captained by Francis Crozier.

The pair departed on their ill-fated expedition from London in May 1845, and were last seen sailing towards the Lancaster Sound by two whaling ships in July that year. After that, they were never seen again. 

While no one knows for sure exactly what happened to the crew, experts believe the ships were lost in 1848 after they became locked in the ice near King William Island and that the crews abandoned them in a hopeless bid to reach safety. 

In 1854, an explorer by the name of John Rae came across an Inuit who claimed to have met the expedition, and produced a small silver plate with the engraving ‘Sir John Franklin K.C.B’. However, the man also told Rae that the explorers had resorted to cannibalism in order to stay alive.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2749408/Canada-finds-1-2-explorer-ships-lost-Arctic.html#ixzz3Cu1YRFC4