Grade 9 Academic Geography – Strand 4 The North

Finding Franklin: How a 169-year-old mystery was solvedCharlie Gillis and Chris Sorensen. 13 September 2014. Finding Franklin: How a 169-year-old mystery was solve. MacLeans Magazine. (Online) http://www.macleans.ca/society/finding-franklin-how-a-169-year-old-mystery-was-solved/

The moment when Ryan Harris first laid eyes on one of Sir John Franklin’s missing ships was one of panic as much as jubilation. He was taking a break in the cuddy of the small research vessel Investigator when he heard a commotion outside. Fellow Parks Canada underwater archaeologist Jonathan Moore was worried that the side-scan sonar trailing behind the boat had drifted dangerously close to the sea floor. Harris rushed to help. As they both stared at the screen, the unmistakable signature of a sunken ship crawled past, 11 metres below the surface in the eastern Queen Maud Gulf. “I pointed and said, ‘That’s it, that’s it! We found it!’ ” Harris recalls, adding that he raised both arms over his head in celebration. mAn Ottawa Senators fan, he told his colleagues this must be what it feels like to win the Stanley Cup. The next few minutes were full of hoots, hollers and high-fives. “We were just so happy.”

After more a few more passes, Harris and his colleagues returned to the icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The following day they went back out in the Investigator with a remotely operated submersible to take high-definition pictures, confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt the authenticity of the wreck, missing since 1848. That, in turn, set in motion a quiet series of phone calls to both Ottawa and London (the ships technically belong to Britain).

The next few hours were a whirlwind. Harris and others were whisked back to Ottawa on a series of red-eye flights just in time for Tuesday’s press conference with a beaming Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It was only later in the evening that the enormity of the find—just as Queen Elizabeth II sent along her congratulations—finally began to sink in: Harris and his colleagues had written themselves into one of Canada’s most enduring mysteries. “So many expeditions have been launched to look for Franklin and his men,” he says. “So many lives had been lost in what had so far been a fruitless search.” Next steps include returning for a dive to determine which of the two ships they found, and hopefully find clues as to the other’s whereabouts.

It was the hunt that almost wasn’t. Over the past couple of weeks, the ice—dense and relentless—had irresistibly pushed the team waging an all-out search for Franklin’s two vessels, the Erebus and Terror, into an area near previous searches. It’s a fickle force, the Arctic ice. In the summer of 1848, it refused to release the Franklin ships and forced desperate men on their doomed march across the tundra—a march that defines them in the public mind, grisly reports of cannibalism notwithstanding.

Maybe this was the ocean’s way of giving back. Grim-faced, the search team aboard the Laurier probed on, scanning the shallows of the Queen Maud Gulf in case Inuit recollections of a ship sinking in the area were true. Further away, another ship—the well-appointed and ice-strengthened Akademik Sergey Vavilov—attempted to scan the ice-choked Victoria Strait with a high-tech underwater drone. The current search for Franklin’s ships began in 2008, with this year’s mission representing the most ambitious effort yet, including multiple government departments and private companies.

Even with all those resources, the searchers needed a touch of luck. In this case, it took the form of two Government of Nunavut archaeologists who took a chopper ride from the Laurier to a nearby island, barren and rocky, to mark the location of some early Inuit tent sites. With the help of their pilot, they identified two artifacts that were determined to be from the lost ships: An iron fitting from a Royal Navy ship and a plug for a deck hawse, the iron pipe

through which the ship’s chain cable would descend into the locker below. Officials leading the search hailed the discovery as the “first of its kind in the area in modern times.”

But really it was a signpost, pointing the way for the truly epic discovery to come—one that not only promises to shed light on one of the world’s most compelling maritime tragedies, but could also give Canada’s efforts to assert itself in the Arctic an important boost. “It was all surprisingly emotional,” Harris recalls. “A lot of tears were shed. We’ve invested so much of our time, so many years. We were aware of the magnitude of what we were looking for.”

The disappearance of the ships was an enigma for the ages. But the allure of this search lay chiefly in what the wrecks might tell us. What went wrong? Why did this expedition veer from adversity to desolation to despair and, finally, to horror?

It had begun, after all, steeped in imperial British confidence. Franklin had departed Greenhithe, England, in May 1845, in charge of two iron-reinforced bomber vessels, stocked with food that should have lasted three years. It was the greatest expedition of its time, and seemed sure to achieve its goal of charting a Northwest Passage to the Far East.

That something was amiss became clear soon enough. Three crew members died mysteriously while the ships spent their first winter off Beechey Island, in the heart of the Arctic archipelago. By September 1846, the Erebus and Terror were mired in ice and never sailed again. Only shreds of the nightmare that followed are known. The men wintered that year on nearby King William Island and were apparently unable to get the vessels moving again in the spring. By then, 24 were dead—an inexplicably high toll—while Franklin himself perished the following summer, according to a note searchers found in a cairn years later. So, after a second miserable winter on the island, the remaining men decided to cut their losses. They abandoned the ships, setting off across the 13,000-sq.-km landmass, dragging their wooden lifeboats behind them.

Were they stricken with lead poisoning? Forensic analysis suggests so. Lead-sealed food tins may have been to blame, or perhaps desalination systems on the ships designed to provide them with fresh water. Whatever the source, the men’s good judgment had abandoned them (an effect, it’s worth noting, of lead-related illness). If their stores were exhausted, their best bet would have been to head northeast for a known supply cache on the north tip of Somerset Island. From there, they were more likely to attract the attention of rescue ships. Instead, they

headed southwest in an apparently misguided attempt to find the mouth of the Back River on what is now the Canadian mainland.

By that point they’d evidently split into two walking parties, suggesting discord, or even mutiny. Inuit witnesses later recounted the men “falling down and dying as they walked along.” Handwritten notes later recovered were strewn with delirious-sounding notations. By all indications they had indeed resorted to cannibalism. One Inuk hunter interviewed in 1879 recalled finding a lifeboat containing sawed off human bones, which led him to conclude “the white men had been eating each other.” A 1992 excavation later turned up bones of crewmen bearing tell-tale cut marks from metal implements.

Search after search dispatched by the British admiralty and the Hudson’s Bay Company brought home these gruesome clues—skeletons, scraps of uniforms, along with hundreds of pages of Inuit testimony recounting sightings of the men, and of the ships not long before they sank. Still, there was no sign of the Erebus or Terror, and by the onset of the 20th century, public interest was waning. Britain was girding for war, while the newly confederated Canada regarded the story as its mother country’s tragic misadventure. Only in the 1980s, when a forensic anthropologist named Owen Beattie disinterred the bodies on Beechey Island, did the Franklin expedition truly capture the Canadian imagination.

Samples taken for molecular analysis led Beattie to float the lead-poisoning hypothesis—the first plausible theory as to why the expedition was obliterated. The book he co-authored with John Geiger, Frozen in Time, triggered a frenzy of cultural interest in a long-forgotten story. Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood wrote fiction around the legend. Canadian historians began digging into the record and, perhaps most importantly, men and women with knowledge of the frozen North began to ruminate. The Arctic cold, they knew, guards metal and wood from decay as surely as it does human remains. If the ships went down where Inuit accounts suggested, they might shed light on the greatest of maritime tragedies.

None was more enthusiastic than Geiger, who went on to become CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society. Last year, his organization joined the initiative at Harper’s invitation. For years, Geiger had wondered about the trove of information the boats might hold. Today, he admits he can scarcely wait to find out what’s on board the one they’ve found.

“There may be documents in sealed cylinders. There may be surviving paper,” says Geiger, who was aboard a research vessel a short sail away when news of the find began spreading. “If we’ve found the flagship Erebus, Sir John’s quarters will be there, his belongings. There will be human remains. There will be insights into how they lived and how they died. There’s no end to the answers we might be able to glean.”

To hear the Prime Minister tell it, the stakes for Canada are enormous. The statement from his office announcing the discovery drew a direct link between the shipwreck, Canada’s claims to the Arctic and its internationally important waters. “Franklin’s ships are an important part of Canadian history given that his expeditions, which took place nearly 200 years ago, laid the foundations of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty,” the PM said.

Geiger concurs. “I don’t think anyone seriously disputes sovereignty over this part of this area,” he says. “But there are questions about the seriousness of our presence and our exercise of sovereignty. There’s something special about the Arctic, and this is a way to drive a connection between southern Canadians and their North.”

All of that searching for Erebus and Terror helped to advance Canada’s knowledge about the potential shipping route. Much of the Arctic seabed remains uncharted to modern standards, making navigation hazardous. During this year’s expedition, one of the search vessels—the Martin Bergmann—temporarily ran aground, but didn’t sustain any damage. “The Arctic is an area where a lot has to be done,” says Denis Haines, the director general of the Canadian Hydrographic Service at Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “Many charts are obsolete due to the fact they’re not located using GPS. Sometimes we find ourselves in areas, and think we know where we are, but we’re really 200 to 300 m beside that.”

It’s not clear whether Harper is really talking about sovereignty in the strict sense of the term when discussing Franklin’s significance to Canada. “We use the word sovereignty loose and fast,” says Robert Huebert, an associate political science professor at the University of Calgary. “Everybody does. Really what they’re saying is this is significant for Canadian nationalism.” He compared it to the way Americans have embraced the bloody Battle of the Alamo in 1836 as part of their national story even though Texas was not yet a member of the union. For Canada, then, Franklin has become a symbol of courage and the spirit of exploration in a particularly harsh land. It hardly matters that he was British. “It’s significant for our national story and the way the North was explored,” Huebert says.

The effort—and the discovery—couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Though largely overshadowed by the Franklin hunt, two Canadian icebreakers spent the summer further north, scouring the Arctic seabed as part of an effort to lay claim to the region and its valuable resources. Ottawa has already made a preliminary submission to a United Nations commission to extend Canada’s reach as far as the North Pole—a position that is being challenged by Russia, among others. Now, amid the sudden deterioration of relations between Russia and the West over the Ukraine crisis, all that territorial jockeying has taken on increased significance. “The bottom line is the Ukraine crisis has sharpened our realization of what the Russians are doing with regards to militarizing the Arctic,” says Huebert. “It’s a new geopolitical reality.”

For Harper, personally, the find—and the promise of future Franklin-related discoveries—is thus a vindication of sorts. He’s sometimes been criticized for talking big about Canada’s commitment to the North but not following through with the necessary cash. Every summer he has taken tours of the region that were laden with photo ops—standing stoically on the decks of navy ships, bouncing over the tundra on all-terrain vehicles—and has promised to spend billions on infrastructure, including a fleet of Arctic offshore patrol ships, the polar icebreaker John G. Diefenbaker, a deepwater port at Nanisivik on the northern tip of Baffin Island, and a High Arctic Research Centre at Cambridge Bay. But while big-ticket government projects have a way of being delayed or downsized, solving the mystery of the Franklin expedition—which now looks increasingly likely—represents a relatively inexpensive way to make a big international splash in Arctic waters at a time when the entire world is looking. It was a gamble, to be sure, but one that just paid big near a small, ice-scraped island in the high Arctic.

Erebus -- Franklin Expedition wreck foundChris Sorensen and Aaron Hutchins. 16 April 2015. Erebus found: Inside the first tour of the Franklin Expedition wreck. MacLeans Magazine. (Online) http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/erebus-found-inside-the-first-tour-of-the-franklin-expedition-wreck/

When Ryan Harris first saw HMS Erebus, one of two Franklin Expedition ships that many figured were lost to history until its discovery last September, he equated it to winning the Stanley Cup. So when the underwater archaeologist gave the first tour of the wreckage via a live

video on Thursday—swimming around the ship that sits below nearly two metres of solid ice—it was like a well-deserved victory parade.

With air being fed in via a breathing hose, Harris sounded like a friendly distant cousin of Darth Vader as he talked about the contents found aboard the ship. With massive lasagna-shaped pieces of sea kelp almost everywhere, Harris swam all over, from the stern to the deck. He showcased Erebus’s main mast with its top broken off, likely snapped by the ice. The tiller, which helped turn the rudder, was twelve feet long and appeared to be made out of solid bronze, Harris said. “Like everything on this ship, it was heavily overbuilt to operate in the Arctic.”

And though the ship was built for exploration, it still had weapons, including two brass six-pounder cannons. “It was a naval ship, after all, and it was scheduled to get back to England at least three years [after] its departure,” Harris noted. “They could never know how the world’s political situation would change over that time, so they had to be prepared for anything.”

Though the frigid Arctic waters are where Erebus tragically ended its journey 170 years ago, the freezing temperatures may in fact be what kept the ship so well preserved ever since. Underwater, the organic materials on board, such as wood, are exposed to less oxygen than if they were above ground. Meanwhile, the ice that covered the surface above a good chunk of the year protected the ship from harsh waves. Inside the ship, researchers hope to find clues that may even unlock another one of Canada’s cold cases, the location of its travel companion, HMS Terror.

Bad weather delayed the setup of the dive camp by about a week, and the dives themselves by three days. Blizzard conditions hampered the massive airlift out of Yellowknife and Cambridge Bay, and heavy crosswinds made landing transport planes on the ice dangerous. But now that weather has finally improved, with clear skies and no wind, there is a new problem: too much sun. At high latitudes, there is about an extra 10 minutes of sunlight with each passing day this time of year. By early May, it’s estimated the ice surface will be too soft and sticky for the hulking aircraft that are supplying the camp to safely land and take off again—not unlike barrelling down a ski hill and hitting a sunny patch of snow that nearly stops you in your tracks. “We don’t want it to get any warmer,” says Rear-Admiral John Newton of the Royal Canadian Navy, who flew in earlier this week with former BlackBerry CEO and Arctic Research Foundation co-founder Jim Balsillie.

The struggles to erect the camp highlight the challenges of operating in the Arctic, where the larger sovereignty-focused operation Nunalivut is held every year. Weather is a constant factor, as is the availability of aircraft and fuel. After making more than 70 flights over the past week, two of the Royal Canadian Air Force’s Twin Otter aircraft—described as the “workhorse of the North”—sat idle Wednesday as they awaited parts in Cambridge Bay, where a large military camp has been erected. Meanwhile, the army conducted patrols on the ice to the east of Victoria Island using snowmobiles and sleds. The mostly Inuit Canadian Rangers have also conducted patrols. In all, about 200 military personnel from across the country are involved in the operation coordinated by Joint Task Force North.

Planning and logistics are key to operating above the Arctic Circle. At the dive site, in the eastern Queen Maud Gulf, everything from food to diving equipment must be flown in and back out again. Ice experts first inspected the makeshift runway at the dive site to make sure it was sturdy enough to handle all scheduled traffic. Tom Zagon, a physical scientist with the Canadian Ice Service who conducted an “ice reconnaissance mission” earlier this month, says sea ice can behave elastically, rippling and bending under heavy loads. A test flight with an LC-130, the designation given to a ski-equipped C-130 Hercules operated by the U.S. Air National Guard, was conducted earlier in the week without any cargo onboard to double-check Zagon’s calculations.

As for the dive itself, members of the Navy’s Fleet Diving Unit are working in tandem with underwater archeologists from Parks Canada. In the run-up to the operation, the two groups of divers, which normally operate in very different worlds, conducted several joint practice runs, including one in Quebec City. The Navy divers taught the Parks divers how to use their tethered equipment and cut holes in the ice—usually in a triangle shape to make climbing in and out easier—with a diesel-powered, hot-water tool. Parks Canada divers, meanwhile, gave the Navy clearance divers lessons on how to carefully map out a 160-year-old shipwreck using a grid system.

Though the frigid and unpredictable Arctic weather creates havoc with just about every other aspect of the operation, Petty Officer 1st Class Sean Barry told Maclean’s shortly before he left for Nunavut that, once the divers are underwater, there’s little difference between diving in the Arctic and Halifax Harbour, where the navy’s dive unit is located. “The diving is actually the easy part,” he says, adding that there’s less turbidity and zero chance of being pushed off site by rough seas. The divers were also able to string up lights under the ice using ice screws, better illuminating the wreck.

Yet, for all the technical and logistical challenges of making the dives on Erebus happen in the midst of an Arctic winter, Barry said it was the human factor that he would be most preoccupied with as he camps 11 metres directly above the shipwreck. His main job as one of the team’s leaders was making sure the divers didn’t overdo it and wind up injured—a fear that’s only been heightened thanks to the compressed schedule. “We’re looking at about 12- to 14-hour days,” said Barry. “Because this is part of history, people are probably going to try and push themselves. Up there, if an accident happens, it’s hard to get resources.”

The cost of the expeditions and its subsequent research weren’t immediately available from Tony Clement, president of the Treasury Board, who was on hand to watch the live feed of Erebus from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. The federal government appears to be keen to capitalize on the ship’s discovery as a proof positive of Canada’s claim to ownership over the northern waters. The MP mentioned Arctic sovereignty on multiple occasions in reference to these expeditions. “I don’t think we’re going to find a Russian flag on the Erebus,” Clement said. (Of course, HMS Erebus being a British ship, they won’t find a Canadian flag either.)

As underwater archaeologists learn more about Erebus, crews have covered more than 800 sq. km of the Victoria Strait, where they hope to one day find HMS Terror.

For the future of Erebus, which can no longer lay claim to Canada’s greatest unsolved mystery, don’t be surprised if the area welcomes tourists in the foreseeable future. “There’s already a really good heritage centre in Gjoa Haven,” said Jeff Anderson, VP of Operations for Western and Northern Canada with Parks Canada, adding they can build on telling the story of the Franklin at the Nattilik Heritage Centre. That could include boat tours or cruise ships, he said while at the ROM.

As for letting Canadians visit Nunavut and explore the site themselves underwater, Anderson added: “That’s something to explore.”