Episode 27: Death and Discovery — The Search for the Northwest Passage

Listen to Learn More About:

• Sir John Franklin, a captain who searched for the Northwest Passage

• Erebus McClure and the discovery of the Northwest Passage

• Kensal Green, the oldest of the Magnificent 7 Cemeteries

SOURCES

Full Script

In 1832, after a half century of rapid population growth, the British Parliament passed an act encouraging the construction of private cemeteries outside of London. Over the following decade, 7 sprawling and beautiful graveyards were created: Kensal Green, West Norwood, Highgate, Abney Park, Brompton, Nunhead, and Tower Hamlets. These days, they’re known as the Magnificent Seven Cemeteries. 

Their age and grandeur make them feel monumental – some of them are overrun by gorgeous marble and stone, some by the greenery and foliage and undergrowth fighting to reclaim their space. In others, tombs and headstones lay in ruins, victims of the Blitz in World War II. 

Walking through them, you’ll encounter flowers, modest wooden crosses, massive mausoleums, wild blackberry bushes, gold-flecked mosaics, and the graves of figures ranging from Harold Pinter to George Eliot to Karl Marx.

Kensal Green is the oldest, and largest, of the Magnificent Seven. Here, great trees drop blankets of leaves between the tombs. Expansive fields of green are dotted by gravestones. And deep within the cemetery rests a red granite tombstone, barely rising out of its tangle of grass. It belongs to Sir Robert John Le Mesurier McClure, famed 19th-century British explorer of the Arctic. The epitaph on it is in two parts. First: “Thus We Launch Into This Formidable Frozen Sea,” and then: “Spes Mea in Deo,” Latin for “My hope is in God.”

 This part of the cemetery is dedicated to explorers. Sir Robert McClure is buried surrounded by colleagues of the British Admiralty who also put their hopes in God and launched into formidable seas.  And, if you visit our website, mydarkpath.com, you can see some photographs I just took this week of this unique cemetery.  

 There’s Admiral Sir John Ross, who led some of the very first Arctic expeditions in the early 1800s; Admiral Henry John Rous, who once crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a sinking ship; and Admiral Richard Charles Mayne, on whose journeys fossils were collected for study by one Charles Darwin.

 Many other colleagues, however, are not buried in Kensal Green. Nor are they buried elsewhere in London. In fact, they are not buried, at all – their bodies rest somewhere else, far away, undiscovered. Common sailors, soldiers, officers, and more, all lost to ice or the seas. Exploration in the 19th century was a dangerous gamble, especially in the Arctic, and so many of those who set out never made it home, were never put to rest.

 Maybe the most famous of these lost explorers is Captain Sir John Franklin, who spent decades exploring the Arctic starting in 1818. He ultimately left home for the final time in 1845 as Captain of the HMS Terror. He was in search of one of the dreams of every great navy on Earth at that time – the Northwest Passage.

 We don’t know if Franklin, or anyone from the HMS Terror, or its companion ship, the HMS Erebus, ever discovered the Passage; but it’s considered very unlikely. They disappeared into the Arctic and never returned home. What little we know of their fates comes from the scraps of evidence collected over a hundred years’ worth of subsequent Arctic journeys – expeditions that first set out to find and rescue Franklin and his crew; but later, as hope diminished, carried on simply in hopes of learning what happened to them. What they found showed the dark path you walk, the grim and awful costs, when you travel to the most dangerous frontiers on Earth.

Sir Robert McClure, now buried here in Kensal Green, was part of one of these daring rescue attempts. Years after the disappearance of the Terror and the Erebus, McClure captained the HMS Investigator as part of a mission to find them. He failed at that mission; but in failing, he discovered something else entirely: the very Northwest Passage that Franklin and so many nations had spent lives and treasure looking for. 

It is one of the great ironies of exploration: That this triumphant accomplishment only happened because of two expeditions that each failed to find what they were looking for. The God they put their hopes in, it seems, works in mysterious ways. This is the story of their quest.

***

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and welcome to Season Two of the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. We hope you’ll check us out on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, and watch our full video versions on Youtube.  And now in 2022 we’re launching our Patreon, where subscribers will have access to exclusive full episodes starting with our special miniseries, the Secrets of the Soviets, a  tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold War Moscow.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 1 of Season 2: Death and Discovery – The Search for the Northwest Passage

PART ONE

For a long time, the Northwest Passage was just a theory; or maybe more like a dream. Explorers from Europe’s colonial powers hoped that a sailing route existed through the Arctic, at the top of North America, a route that would connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans by water. They had no evidence such a passage existed. But their efforts to prove it, to discover the Passage, dominated exploration in this part of the world for centuries. 

Cartographers in the 15th and 16th centuries described their vision of the Northwest Passage as “The Strait of Anjan”. Some believed that it was located around the Bering Strait in Alaska. Others believed that the peninsula we now call Baja California was actually an island, and that the opening of the Strait of Anjan could be found there. It’s strange to think now just how recently in history our map of the world had such giant blank spots on it.

There are natural reasons why wealthy nations, Great Britain in particular, would be obsessed with the Northwest Passage. First, it would change international trade completely. Europeans paid top dollar for the products of Asian nations – tea, porcelain, cotton, spices. As long, expensive, and dangerous as these voyages around the globe were, the profits could make them worth the risk. Remember, the Panama Canal had not yet been dug – if a ship sailing from Europe wanted to reach China, it meant thousands of extra miles to get around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. A direct route through the Arctic could cut months off of these journeys – saving time, money, and lives.

The same logic applied not just to commerce, but to war. A nation that could send its Navy halfway around the world faster than any other would have a fearsome advantage over its rivals.

Then there came the aura of dominance and conquest that came with spreading over the globe, the act of planting one’s flag on some previously unmapped area. The Arctic wasn’t unknown or unpopulated, of course, and the Inuit population that lived there turns out to play an astonishing role in the mystery of the HMS Terror – we’ll get to that at the end. But for Great Britain and their rivals, these were territories to be claimed for their own purposes.

With all these motivations aligned, and crucial new technologies producing stronger and more durable ships, the first half of the 19th century saw huge fortunes invested in the search for the Northwest Passage. By the time Sir John Franklin left on his doomed voyage, large-scale expeditions had been probing and charting the area around the North Pole for over 25 years.

Some of the greatest minds of the Navy, and some of the most advanced technology, went into outfitting these expeditions. These voyages could last for years, thanks to one especially radical new invention – the tin can, first introduced in 1810. When it’s part of the plan for the expedition that you’re going to get trapped in ice for months at a time, the ability to store food for long spans without it spoiling could be the difference between life and death for the sailors committed to the trip.

And while one expedition after another failed to discover a passage, they persistently chipped away at the unknowns in the Arctic – mapping regions, closing off dead ends, marking potentially viable routes for later, and establishing contact with Inuit communities. In other words, each and every failure brought success that much closer.

Maybe the most famous of these early expeditions was led by Sir William Edward Parry. From 1818 on he had made tremendous headway over multiple trips. In 1819 he commanded HMS Hecla, an old bomb vessel. Bomb vessels were naval ships designed to fire explosive mortar shells at landlocked targets. So they were built especially strong, with reinforced hulls meant to withstand the recoil of the mortars. They also had iron plates, thick oak crossbeams within the ship so it could withstand external pressure, and front riggings made of chain. These reinforcements made them ideal for Northern voyages, where they’d be tested against the power of ice sheets that could literally crush a ship to splinters.

While the Hecla expedition was considered at the time to be the most successful Arctic voyage yet, it still revealed the grave dangers of these journeys – Parry’s ship was stuck in ice for 10 months, including three months of total darkness in the winter, with temperatures dropping to negative 54 degrees. During these times, Parry didn’t need to chart any courses or plan any combat, his command responsibility was to keep his sailors alive and occupied. They exercised, they put on plays, they even published a newspaper – but despite all these efforts, they were slowly starving, and suffering from scurvy. They finally freed themselves from the ice in August of 1820, and by the time they reached home two months later; it was considered a miracle that, during the whole ordeal, only one member of the crew had died. 

On another expedition, Captain James Ross discovered a piece of land that he (incorrectly) believed was a peninsula. Later it would be confirmed to be an island; but Ross named it King William Land. And when he reached the Western side of King William Land, he saw another headland far in the distance. He decided to name it after an Officer who was one of the most famous Arctic explorers, as well as a personal friend. He dubbed it Cape Franklin.

Ross had no idea of the irony this would later create. There was no way for him to know that, many years later, Cape Franklin was in the area where its own namesake, Sir John Franklin, would spend the final months of his life.

***

John Franklin was just ten years old the first time he saw the ocean. He’d spent his early years in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, surrounded by land. The story goes that, upon seeing the ocean for the first time, Franklin decided he was destined to sail on it for Britain. Whether this is the truth, a myth, or something in between, in the year 1800, Franklin enlisted in the Royal Navy. He was just 14.

You might even recognize the names of one of the ships he served on in his early years— the HMS Investigator. While his previous service had been in combat, when he joined the crew of the Investigator as a midshipman, they were exploring, charting the coast of Australia. 

It provided him a hard early lesson in the dangers of uncharted territory. On his journey home, the ship he was on wrecked on a reef hundreds of miles from the Australian coast. The captain and a small team left the remainder of the crew on the reefs, taking a small boat in a long-shot attempt to reach Sydney for help. Franklin and the other crew members lived on that reef for six weeks, using the ship’s sails for shelter; until, miraculously, they were rescued. 

He faced death many more times in those years, seeing combat at the Battle of Trafalgar and in the War of 1812. But instead of filling him with caution, or a desire for early retirement, John Franklin began to believe that he could beat any odds, that God was protecting him. As he rose in the ranks and earned command responsibilities, this egotism, this instinct to forge ahead even in a potentially fatal scenario, meant that he was no longer just putting his own life at risk, he was risking the lives of his crew.

From his earliest years exploring the Arctic, this pride of his had deadly consequences. In 1819, he led a team out of Hudson Bay and spent two years trekking overland across the Arctic shores, attempting to chart 550 miles of coastline using only canoes and walking. Of the 20 men who came on his expedition, roughly half died.

Many died of starvation. Franklin stubbornly insisted on always pushing on, even when supplies were low and conditions poor. But lack of food wasn’t the only danger; as conditions worsened, the crew members became a danger to one another. In one particularly horrific incident, a gunfight broke out when one of the men was suspected of cannibalism. There were multiple fatalities. Those that did survive Franklin’s trek did so by eating rock lichen and scraps of leather.

The British Admiralty didn’t see this as a failure of leadership – rather, they saw expeditions like this as a success. Franklin was nicknamed “The Man Who Ate His Boots”. In 1829, he was knighted. Could it be that lives may have been saved if the powers that be hadn’t done so much to celebrate and reward the fatal pride of people like Sir John Franklin? On the flip side, can anything great ever be achieved without risk?  Can any discovery be made without consequences?  This is the great burden of leadership - the creation of the new, the discovery of the unknown while caring for and protecting the people you lead. Ponder these questions as we go and think how differently the story we’re telling may have turned out.

On February 7th, 1845, Sir John Franklin, now a decorated veteran of Arctic exploration, was appointed to lead two ships – HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, on yet another quest for the Northwest Passage. They would work to find connections between partial routes that had been charted already. Franklin still had absolute faith that he was guided and protected by God. And the Admiralty had absolute faith in him.

Both ships were seasoned, strong, and tested. Like the HMS Hecla commanded by Sir William Parry, they were bomb vessels. They had been modified to include an early version of central heating, to help the crew endure the frigid winters. They had even survived multiple trips to the Antarctic. For surviving months or even years in the brutal ice near the North Pole, they were the state of the art.

The crew was heavily stocked with veterans of Arctic explorations. Scientists, marines, surgeons, experienced ice masters who had served on whaling ships – even accountants, there on the life-saving job of tracking the ship’s supplies.

One of the ice masters, James Reid, wrote in his final letter to his wife: 

“It may be two years— it may be three or four but I am quite willing to go. Sir John told me that if I went the voyage with him, and landed safely in England again, I would be looked after all my life… A number of people think it strange of me going, but they would go if they knew as much about ice as I know.”

Despite his confidence, he promised his wife it would be his final journey, and they took out a 100-pound insurance policy on his life before he left. That’s about $17,000 today. 

The Terror and Erebus left from their port in Greenland in July of 1845. In August, they were spotted by a group of whalers in Baffin Bay.

It was the last time either ship was seen by European eyes.

PART TWO

A year and a half later, in January of 1847, the Admiralty’s official line regarding the ships was that it had, quote, “unlimited confidence in the skills and resources of Sir John Franklin.” It insisted that it was not anxious at all about the expedition. But quietly, they were offering rewards to whaling ships for any information concerning the ships’ locations.

In the fall, the first official rescue expeditions launched. Ships were ordered to the Bering Strait, to ascertain if Franklin had ever reached it, while other ships directly followed the course he was supposed to follow. Additional search parties were sent on land in the Arctic.

These missions weren’t just brave, they were remarkably creative. The ships were equipped with balloons and gas – the idea being that they would soar above the Arctic, dropping letters printed on silk for Franklin’s men to find. Arctic foxes were trapped, outfitted with collars with messages printed on them, then released back into the wild.

With thousands of square miles of territory, a common method for communication was cairns– man-made structures of stacked rocks that signaled to passersby there was a message protected inside. Search parties trying to find Franklin’s expedition were trained to identify cairns, and left some of their own. 

And on January 20th, 1850, the HMS Investigator set sail under the command of  . Accompanied by its commanding ship, the HMS Enterprise, its mission was to sail around Cape Horn in South America, resupply in Honolulu, then enter the Arctic from the Pacific Ocean, to see if Captain Franklin’s expedition had made it to the other side. At the time the Investigator launched, the Terror and the Erebus had been missing for nearly five years.

McClure was known as a brooding, impatient captain, sometimes too openly ambitious. And on this mission, it immediately became clear that he valued speed more than safety. He pushed the Investigator to its limits, cutting short their resupply time, gambling on a course that took them through dangerous, uncharted reefs in the Aleutian Islands. And when he reached the Kotzbue[kah-zuh-byoo] Sound, he ignored explicit orders and intentionally left the HMS Enterprise behind. While the mission was designed for two ships working together; the Investigator sailed forth into the unknown by itself. 

They passed through the Bering Strait, along the coast of Alaska. They may have been the first European ships to ever sail these seas – the Inuit they came in contact with had never met Europeans before. Fortunately, McClure had an interpreter aboard – a missionary named August Miertsching, who had previously spent time among the Inuit in Labrador.

But on September 21st, the Investigator became frozen in ice. It couldn’t search for clues about Franklin anymore. It could no longer even move at will. It was at the mercy of nature, floating in whatever direction, and at whatever speed, the ice floated. For all of McClure’s stubbornness, his belief that his crew could prove its dominance over the elements, the Arctic had rendered his ship powerless.

Of all the many twists and turns of this story, maybe the greatest is where the floating ice happened to take the Investigator. One day during their imprisonment, a mass of land appeared in the distance. The sailors worked to calculate where they were and what it might be. And it proved to be a piece of land they knew; it was on their charts as Melville Island.

The significance of this was immediately clear to McClure – Melville Island had been discovered by Admiral Parry in 1819, on an expedition that had approached from the East. In other words, when the Investigator entered from the West, got trapped, and was carried deeper into the Arctic by the random drift of ice, it showed them that there actually was a missing link between the Pacific and the Atlantic. There was a real Northwest Passage. 

McClure couldn’t reach Melville Island in his trapped ship. Instead, in late October, he led a small party to travel across the ice to it. And in doing so, he became the first European to discover a Northwest Passage. He later wrote that, even if his expedition was unable to rescue Franklin, they “should not return to his country with empty hands.” Returning, however, was not a given, and McClure was soon forced to face another great irony – that he had made a discovery that would change the world, but only if his crew could survive long enough to share the news.

And as the weather grew colder, the ice thickened, and the temperature dropped to negative 60 degrees. The crew was under constant threat of icebergs exponentially larger than their ship; if just one intersected their path, they would not be able to avoid being crushed. 

For a full year, the crew of the Investigator faced a test of almost impossible endurance, with only fleeting moments of control over their own vessel during the warmer months. They hadn’t escaped the Arctic in 1850, and once the summer ended, it was clear that they wouldn’t escape in 1851 either. And that’s when Captain McClure made a fateful choice. He ordered the ship into an uncharted bay, trusting his gut that it would be a safer, more stable environment to pass their second winter. He even named it “The Bay of God’s Mercy”.

Many in his crew disagreed. Ship’s surgeon Alexander Armstrong wrote in his journal that it would have been a mercy if they had never entered it. 

And it was his doubts, not McClure’s stubborn faith, which turned out to be correct. As the winter of 1851 passed into the spring of 1852, the crew hunkered down against cold, sickness, hunger, and claustrophobia; and they survived. But when the summer came, the ice around them did not thaw.  

Every day, seamen climbed 800 feet up an icy slope to scout for open water. Rations were reduced even further. In August, they attempted to break up ice by blasting it with gunpowder. Later that month, they saw a strip in the ice briefly melt, and then slowly, dreadfully, freeze back into ice again. I can’t imagine how awful a sight that must have been, how much it must have felt like their hopes were being sealed away forever. 

By September of 1852, it was clear that with the weather getting colder again, the Investigator would be forced to remain in Mercy Bay for at least another winter. Captain McClure addressed the crew with a speech, attempting to prepare them for the worst while still inspiring them with hope. One member of the crew described the speech as follows:

“He declared frankly that the ice would not break up this summer, and therefor they would be compelled to pass a second winter in the same place; he will do everything in his power to make their lives throughout the long winter as pleasant and comfortable as possible, and he urged them not to lose heart, but with firm faith to trust in God, under Whose protection they were, to discipline ourselves and behave like British seamen, whose steadfast courage had never failed; for himself he had firm conviction that not one of us would be left behind, but they would safely reach their fatherland.”

McClure also tried to give them something to look forward to – he had formulated a plan, which he shared with the crew in this speech. When the spring came, he said, a small party would leave the ship, traveling by land, then split up and seek help in multiple directions. The Captain’s bravado made him believe that the crew would be encouraged by the idea. But the truth was, that to many of them, such a grueling march after years of hardship sounded like their death sentence.

The winter of 1852 was even colder than the previous one. Temperatures reached negative 65 degrees. The crew was deprived of sunlight, living on starvation rations, and scurvy was spreading. At times, the ice would press so hard into the ship that they were sure it would crush them to pieces. The ship’s surgeon warned McClure that any sailors sent on this rescue mission he imagined would surely die. But the Captain was unmoved, and preparations for the spring continued.

There is not much on record of the daily lives of the crew in these harsh winters. Discipline was maintained with corporal punishment – like a cat o’ nine tails whip. One man said of the constant, overwhelming hunger that it, quote, “took all the joy out of men, even the desire to live.” Some of the sailors went mad under the strain; according to the record, one was put under constant watch for making, quote, “a terrible noise at night.” We can only imagine what that noise was. 

After months of this grinding torment, on April 6th of 1853, it was a warm enough day to be safely out on the deck. Many sailors were there, building a coffin for a recently deceased friend. Suddenly, far in the distance, they saw a cloaked figure approaching the ship.

It must have seemed like a mirage, a miracle too good to be true. They had been stuck in this ice for nearly two years; and in all that time they hadn’t seen a single other human. As far as they could tell, they were hundreds of miles from anyone. And yet, the cloaked figure was real. 

He was Lieutenant Pim of the HMS Resolute. The Resolute was one of five ships which had sailed in 1852 as part of another search party. Their primary mission was to look for the still-missing Captain Franklin, but they also carried provisions meant for the Investigator, should they happen to meet. Now they were in a position to rescue all the remaining crew. The Resolute was at Dealy Island, and reaching it wouldn’t be easy; but compared with Captain McClure’s mad plan to send out small groups to look for help with no guidance, it was a far safer and more promising.

They traveled light, leaving nearly all their possessions on the ship. Whatever provisions they didn’t need for the journey were emptied onto the shore – just in case some future expedition should come this way and need them. The crew traveled over 40 miles across solid ice, but they reached the Resolute, which was with a sister ship, the HMS Intrepid.

This wasn’t the end of the struggle for McClure’s crew, though. You see, both the Resolute and the Intrepid were also trapped in ice. For everyone who had come from the Investigator, it meant a fourth consecutive winter in the freezing Arctic. I wonder if that small taste of hope and respite made it easier or harder.

In May of 1854, these ships, too, were abandoned as being hopelessly stuck. The combined crews set out in search of one of the other ships from their rescue mission. And finally, they arrive at Beechey Island, and the HMS North Star.

All in all, the iced-in crew of the Investigator had traveled over 700 miles from their original ship, before finally reaching the North Star; which was not trapped nor frozen. It was free to sail to open waters, and bring Captain McClure and his exhausted, demoralized crew home to England. And to bring with them the news that the Northwest Passage was real.

The North Star finally reached England in October of 1854; nearly five years since the Investigator left. Captain Franklin, whom they had set out to find, was still missing, and now presumed dead. Captain McClure was court-martialed for losing the ship under his command; but this was more of a pro forma exercise than a punishment. He was proclaimed a hero, promoted, and given a knighthood, both for his discovery and his feat of survival. He reached the rank of Vice Admiral before finally passing away in 1873.

PART THREE

By the time McClure returned to England, most of the country had already given up hope of ever finding Captain Franklin or his ships. Perhaps the biggest reason any rescue attempts continued was his spouse, Lady Jane Franklin. She refused to accept the fate of her husband, and used the media and her own persistence to pressure the Admiralty and private financiers to underwrite many of the most prominent rescue attempts.

 Time after time, these expeditions set out and then returned, sometimes with a stray artifact, sometimes with an unearthed skeleton. No real clues as to the fate or the whereabouts of the two ships or their commander. 

 Some of the earliest clues weren’t uncovered by any explorers or naval officers at all. John Rae was a surveyor for the Hudson Bay Company in the 1850’s, performing the arduous and often lonesome work of recording the shape and contour of the land in fine detail. His travels often brought him in contact with the Inuit, and in one conversation with them, they described witnessing a group of Europeans traveling south. And from here, the story turns even darker.

 The Inuit later found these same Europeans dead. And the details of their mutilated corpses indicated that, in their final days, these desperate explorers had resorted to cannibalism. Limbs of the dead had been stripped of flesh. Body parts were found in cooking pots.

 The timing and location of this discovery left little doubt that these dead Europeans had come from Captain Franklin’s expedition. And to further confirm this, the Inuit presented John Rae with items recovered from the bodies; they had the names and crests of the crews of the Terror and the Erebus. And some of the recovered artifacts belonged to Captain John Franklin himself.

 When Rae returned to England with this news, it caused a nationwide scandal. While most people presumed that Captain Franklin was dead, at least he had a heroic reputation. His memory was cherished and honored. The gruesome thought that his expedition had descended into cannibalism was, to many, a permanent stain on both Franklin and his crew. Some began to question if they really wanted to solve this mystery.

 Lady Franklin was undeterred. In 1857, she funded a schooner-rigged steam yacht with a small crew for one more search. In the spring of 1859, they reached King William Island, where they split into two groups. The plan was that they would travel along the island’s coasts before meeting up again.

 This time, they discovered a bounty of clues: small artifacts, several skeletons, sledges, and boats. Most important, however, was the discovery of two stone cairns, with messages still inside.

 The cairns had been placed on both the North and South sides of a bay – ideal for a ship to discover as it passed through. Each cairn[care-n] contained an identical message, dated May 28th, 1847; just under two years after the original launch of Captain Franklin’s expedition.  the identical notes summarized where the HMS Erebus and Terror had wintered in 1846 and 1847 and that Sir John Franklin was still alive and commanding the expedition. 

His is what they said:

“28th of May 1847, HMShips Erebus and Terror wintered in the ice in Lat. 70 05’ N, Long. 98 23’W. Having Wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in Lat. 74 43’ 28” N. Long. 91 39’ 15” W after having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat 77, and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. Si John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well.”

 But one of the two cairns contained an additional message, added later. And it provided the answer that Lady John Franklin most dreaded:

“Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men….”

 It went on to say “and start tomorrow 26th for Backs Fish River.”

 Here was confirmation that Sir John Franklin had died near this bay. And the strong indication was that the group of men observed by the Inuit traveling overland was the party of survivors making for Backs Fish River.

 One detail of great importance was that the message seemed to distance Franklin from the abomination of cannibalism. Whatever his men did when they were faced with starvation on their desperate final trek, their Captain was already dead, and played no part in it. 

 And so while this discovery brought grief to Lady Franklin, it also restored her husband’s name in the eyes of the country.

***

The search for the HMS Terror and Erebus never really ended. Over the years, more remnants, more relics, would be discovered in the Arctic. Bodies dug up in the 1980’s, almost a century and a half later, looked as though they had died only recently – preserved by the never-melting ice. When examined through the eyes of modern medicine, these corpses told us that many of these sailors had died from either pneumonia or lead poisoning. But the bones of some of the dead confirmed the chilling stories told by the Inuit; they showed tell-tale marks of cannibalism.

 By 2008, the ships themselves were still unaccounted for – remarkable when you consider the technology we have at our disposal now. The government of Canada undertook a fresh effort to locate the ships. And while they had the benefit of satellites and sonar and maps with detail and accuracy that those old sailors could never have imagined; it turns out that the most valuable asset they had was a single person. His name was Louie Kamookak; and he, more than anybody else, finally fulfilled the real mission of the HMS Investigator. And he wasn’t a scientist, a sailor, or even an amateur explorer.

 Louie Kamookak was an Inuit oral historian; who had spent his life gathering and preserving stories from tribal elders. Some of these stories had been told for many generations; they were a foundational part of the Inuit cultural tradition. When he learned about Franklin’s expedition, details of it resonated strongly with stories that he had heard from those tribal elders. So he set about piecing together the puzzle from both sides; comparing details of these legends with every logbook, cairn message, and artifact collected so far.

 He took his findings to a group of Canadian archaeologists, a complete guide laying out his theory on where the two ships could be found. At first, Parks Canada rejected his proposal, and continued looking elsewhere.

 But in September of 2014, his theory was proven correct. A fellow Inuit, Sammy Kogvik, was working on the research ship “Martin Bergmann”, and recorded sighting a mast jutting out of the water. Parks Canada investigated, and there, right where Louie Kamookak said it would be, was the HMS Erebus, buried below almost forty feet of ice. Its masts had broken off but otherwise, it was in surprisingly good condition. And two years later, its sister ship, the HMS Terror, was found in the same vicinity; under four times as much ice.

 For all the scientific progress brought to bear, all of the evidence meticulously connected, it was the collective memory of the Inuit, the people who knew these lands best, which told the final chapter of Captain Franklin’s lost expedition.

PART FOUR

I’m remembering those phrases that adorn the grave of Sir Robert McClure, Captain of the HMS Investigator and the explorer credited with discovery of the Northwest Passage. “Thus we launch into this Formidable Frozen Sea,” and “Speas Mea in Deo.” “My hope is in God.”

If you asked him, he’d probably tell you that his story, Sir John Franklin’s story, the whole European exploration of the Arctic, is a story of faith; leaving the safety of home to venture into the uncharted parts of the world, risking all in search of something that might not exist.

The quest for the Northwest Passage motivated great nations to develop new techniques and technologies for the exploration of the globe. They saw people survive and endure in environments that would have left them all dead just a few years before. As we’ve seen in our episodes on rocketry research in Germany during World War II, or the tragic early attempts to cross the Pacific Ocean by airplane in the Dole Derby, progress towards the modern age often comes with great risks; the cost in suffering and lives can be high.  What is the right balance?

Or maybe we can’t say what sort of story it is because, in a way, it’s not over yet.

Like I told you, while Captain McClure discovered a Northwest Passage, it was through a combination of water and land. Although there was, technically, a path connecting the two oceans, it was a path no boat could navigate. It wouldn’t be until decades later that a boat legitimately crossed through a Northwest Passage. In 1905, the legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen took a crew of just six people on a shallow-hulled fishing vessel called the Gjoa, and connected the two largest oceans on our planet. The Gjoa, light and nimble, would have been dwarfed by the mighty bomb vessels that sailed before it.

But even now, a reliable route that could be used by commercial ships does not exist. Tragically, though, that’s about to change; as every day, more and more Arctic ice melts from the devastation of climate change. A true Northwest Passage will exist soon; one which, ironically, we made without even trying.

We’ll end our version of this story in 2018, with the death of Louie Kamookak, the Inuit storyteller and historian who was able to combine his knowledge of the land, the tales told by his ancestors, and the records of Franklin’s expedition to finally locate the two lost ships. He was still looking for the remains of the Captain himself when he passed away. Upon his death, the president of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society described him as “the last great Franklin searcher.” In this entire story, he’s the rare individual who accomplished his mission. And I find hope in his version of perseverance; because he didn’t stop after he found the ship. To him, the people were what ultimately mattered.

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Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with Ashley Whitesides and Evadne Hendrix; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Sam French. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

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Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.