Archaeologists have made hundreds of new findings from the wreckage of the HMS Erebus, a ship that Sir John Franklin commanded during his ill-fated Arctic expedition 180 years ago.
The team’s discoveries include pistols, sealed medicine bottles, sea chests and navigation equipment. These are now being examined for clues to explain the loss of the Erebus and her sister ship, the Terror, and the deaths of the 129 men who sailed on them.
The work is considered particularly urgent because the wreck of the Erebus, discovered 10 years ago in shallow waters in Wilmot and Crampton Bay in Arctic Canada, is now being battered by increasingly violent storms as climate change grips the region.
“Parts of the ship’s upper deck have recently collapsed and other parts are leaning dangerously,” said Jonathan Moore, manager of Parks Canada’s underwater team, which completed the latest survey of the wreck. “It gets harder down there.”
Covid-19, which halted all exploration in 2020 and 2021, and severe weather conditions that badly disrupted research in 2018, have made researchers’ efforts even more urgent. As a result, marine archaeologists are left in a race against time to unlock the discovery. secrets of the ship.
Sir John Franklin set out from Greenhithe in Kent in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage, the polar route connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. Their ships, Erebus and Terror, were equipped with steam-powered propellers to help them maneuver through the ice packs while their holds were filled with three years’ worth of canned provisions. But the ships failed to return, and it was not until the 1850s that Scottish explorer John Rae, after meeting with the Inuit, discovered that Franklin had died in 1847 after his ships were trapped in sea ice for two years. Then his men, who were now starving, began to eat each other.
Victorian society was horrified and Rae was denounced, along with his chief persecutor Charles Dickens, claiming that the explorer had no right to believe in a “savage race”. Later, the bones of several crew members were discovered on nearby King William Island in 1997; There were signs of being slaughtered and eaten. Trapped in the ice for years and suffering from scurvy, starvation, and possibly lead poisoning from poorly preserved food cans, the men suffered terrible fates.
But the exact sequence of events that led the expedition’s survivors to abandon their ship in a desperate attempt to seek salvation south seemed destined to remain a mystery until the discovery of the wrecks of the Erebus in 2014 and the Terror in 2016. It now offers a tantalizing prospect of understanding the exact genesis of the disaster that bedeviled the expedition and its crew.
A report from Inuit legends indicates that at least one body remained after the abandonment of Erebus. Could this be Franklin’s body? Archaeologists wonder if his body was found in a coffin in the hold of Erebus. Currently, no human remains were found during the examination of the ship, which was proceeding with great caution, with the explorers very slowly descending along the wreck.
On the other hand, numerous distinctive personalized artifacts have been discovered and brought to the surface, revealing intriguing details about those who piloted the ship. In a cabin believed to belong to Lieutenant Henry Dunda Le Vesconte, Moore and his colleagues found items that included an intact thermometer, a leather book cover and a fishing rod with a brass reel, as well as a leather shoe, storage jars and a sealed fishing rod. A medicine bottle was found in an area thought to represent the captain’s steward’s pantry.
The crew also began excavating a seaman’s chest in the forecastle area, where most of the crew lived. Guns, medicine bottles and coins were found inside. Archaeologists also captured thousands of high-resolution digital photographs that will be used to produce high-fidelity 3D models that are vital to understanding how the site changed over time.
Moore noted that conducting this study in the past has been extremely difficult. While the sea above the wrecks remained ice-free only for short periods of time, diving with conventional scuba equipment was difficult, cold and unpleasant. Most of the time the sea temperature is only one or two degrees above freezing.
But Moore added that recent innovations have made Erebus research much less scary. “We have surface air supply and heated suits, which has made working down there much easier. In fact, we were able to do 68 dives in the 12 days we worked on the wreck in September. We were able to do a lot more research and recovery this way.”
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Almost all of these studies focused on the threatened Erebus. By contrast, the Terror, which sank in deeper waters about 45 miles from the Erebus wreck, is less at the mercy of the elements and was only visited briefly last year.
“Terrorism is 24 meters below sea level, but Erebus “It’s only 11 feet down, which makes the latter our primary concern,” Moore said.
“We’re going to concentrate on that and peel back his story layer by layer.”