Search for Franklin’s ships won’t go cold

British Admiral William Smyth's "HMS Terror in the Ice."

Sir John Franklin wakes up cold.

He steps out on the deck of  HMS Erebus, sees the tired faces of his desperate crew.

He walks to the bow and looks over the edge. He's hoping for just one small crack, melting - any sign that his frozen ships will sail soon.

But, for the 327^th day in a row, nothing.

Of course, it's hard to be certain how Franklin - one of Canada's most famous and fabled explorers - spent his mornings while stranded in Canada's north more than 160 years ago. In fact, no one even knows for certain exactly where he spent those mornings.

Though his ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were designated national historic sites in 1992, nobody knows where they finally came to rest.

Now, Parks Canada is working with the Canadian Coast Guard and the Canadian Hydrographic Service to try to find Franklin's ill-fated ships.

Needle in a haystack

Harris and his crew spend 16 or 17 hours a day scanning the ocean floor.

Ryan Harris,the senior marine acheologist on the team, is preparing to spend about a week this August or September on Coast Guard vessels, scanning the ocean floor with a sonar device.

“It’s like working through a haystack,” he said as he prepares for the trip in his office in Ottawa.

This isn't the first time Harris will spend part of his summer searching for Franklin's ships. He and his team mapped more than 150 square kilometres of the ocean floor in 2008 and 2010. 

It's a team effort. Harris and his crew missed 2009 because the Coast Guard didn't have enough resources available to help with the search.

“Every year we’re in the difficult situation of trying to ensure a vessel of opportunity to work from. In 2009 it just didn’t work out,” he said.

The search area covers about 800 square kilometres both southeast and northeast of O’Reilly Island, located just west of the Adelaide Peninsula in the Queen Maud Gulf.

But, with each pass of the sonar, that search area narrows.

“It is certainly monotonous but you keep at it for the promise of a spectacular discovery that might be only a few minutes away,” Harris described.

Still searchingFinding HMS Erebus and HMS Terror would have brought a substantial reward, even when this poster was printed in 1850.

He and his team are the latest in a long history of scientists, explorers and researchers to search for the ships.

Inuit in the area have monogrammed items from the ship and their traditional knowlege has helped narrow the search.

The British first sent a search party in 1848.

In 1859, Lt. William Hobson found a message in a cairn on Victory Point, King William Island that said the ships had been bound by ice for at least one and a half years in the Victoria Strait.

According to that note, Franklin had died aboard the ship along with 23 other crew members. The 105 remaining survivors abandoned ship in April 1848, even though they were equipped with five years worth of food, to try to make it back to land by walking across the ice. None survived.

More recently, scientists from around the world have tried to locate the ships.

Researchers have found some of the crew's corpses on the tundra. Autopsies revealed the crew had lead poisoning, presumably from their food supply that had been tinned improperly. Some of the men had resorted to cannibalism.

Last summer, Parks Canada researchers found HMS Investigator, a British ship sent to search for Franklin and his crew in 1850. 

Terror and Erebus are still missing.

Realistic optimism

If they do find the sunken ships this summer, Harris is sure it will spark international interest. Science would come first though.

His research team would begin by taking high definition video of the vessels.

“We would study the shipwrecks from stem to stern and take stock of all the structural remains and whatever artifacts might exist on the site and that would certainly precipitate a very long period of intense archeological research,” Harris said.

However, though Harris certainly hopes that they will find the sunken ships this summer, it's a long shot.

He's hoping that, at the very least, they’ll be able to “rule out a large part of the sea floor this year,” hopefully as much as the 150 square kilometres they ruled out in 2010.

And, if they don't find the ships, he would like to go back again to continue looking.

"We have a mandate to find those ships," he said.

Front page photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada

Ryan Harris and his team are headed back to the Arctic to search for HMS Erebus and Terror.