by Archaeologists have made hundreds of new discoveries on the wreck of HMS Erebus, the ship Sir John Franklin commanded on his Arctic voyage 180 years ago.
The team’s finds include pistols, sealed medicine bottles, sailors’ chests and navigational 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.
This work is considered particularly urgent as the wreck of the Erebus – discovered 10 years ago in shallow water in Wilmot and Crampton Bay in the Canadian Arctic – has been battered by increasingly intense storms and climate change. tackle the region.
“Parts of the upper deck of the ship recently collapsed and other parts have a dangerous slope,” said Jonathan Moore, manager of the Parks Canada underwater team that completed the latest inspection of the wreck. “It’s getting tough down there.”
Investigators’ efforts were made even more urgent by Covid-19, which halted all exploration in 2020 and 2021, and by bad weather that severely affected investigations in 2018. As a result, marine archaeologists were left in a race against time. the time to unlock the queries. secrets of the vessel.
Sir John Franklin set off from Greenhithe in Kent in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage, a polar route that connected the Atlantic and the Pacific. His ships, Erebus and Terror, were fitted with steam-driven propellers to help them maneuver in pack-ice and their stocks were filled with a three-year supply of canned goods. However, the ships failed to return, and it was not until the 1850s that the Scottish explorer John Rae discovered, after interviewing the Inuit, that Franklin had died in 1847 after his ship became trapped in sea ice for two years. Later his men, now starving, began to eat each other.
Victorian society was horrified by Rae’s denunciation, and his chief persecutor, Charles Dickens, claimed that the explorer had no right to believe in the “race of desires”. Then, in 1997, the bones of several crewmen were discovered on nearby King William Island – with signs of being cut up and eaten. Trapped in the ice for years and stricken with scurvy, starvation, and possibly lead poisoning from the poorly preserved tins of food, the men had a terrible fate.
But the exact sequence of events that led the survivors of the flight to abandon their ship in their desperate attempt to seek salvation to the south seemed to remain a mystery – until the wreckage of Erebus was discovered in 2014 and Terror in 2016. now offer the exciting prospect of an accurate understanding of the disaster that befell the voyage and crew.
One account from Inuit legend suggests that at least one body remained on the Erebus after its abandonment. Could this be Franklin’s body? Could his body be lying in a casket in the belly of the Erebus, the archaeologists know. Currently, no human remains have been found since the investigation of the ship – which is proceeding very carefully, with explorers very slowly descending down through the wreckage.
On the other hand, many distinctive personalized remains were discovered and brought to the surface, revealing interesting details about the people on board. In one cabin, believed to be that of Second 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 and leather shoe, storage and sealing jars. A pharmaceutical bottle was found in an area believed to represent the captain’s steward’s widow.
The team has also begun excavating a sailor’s chest in the forecastle area, where most of the crew lived. Inside they have found pistols, medicine bottles and coins. Archaeologists have also captured thousands of high-resolution digital photographs which will be used to produce highly accurate 3D models which will be vital to understanding how the site has changed over time.
In the past, this work was extremely difficult to do, Moore said. The sea above the wrecks is only ice-free for short periods, and diving in traditional scuba gear was difficult, cold and unpleasant. Most of the time, the sea temperature is only a degree or two above freezing.
But recent innovations have made investigations into Erebus less daunting, Moore said. “We’ve provided air from the surface and heated suits, and it’s much easier to work down there. In fact, we were able to do 68 dives for the 12 days we worked at the wreck in September. That way we were able to do a lot more investigating and retrieving artefacts.”
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Almost all of this work focused on the threatened Erebus. In contrast, Terror – which sank in deeper water about 45 miles away from the Erebus wreckage – is less at the mercy of the elements and was visited only briefly last year.
“The terror is 24 meters below sea level, but Erebus It’s only 11m down, which is our main concern,” said Moore.
“We’re going to focus on him and peel back his story layer by layer.”
