What an interesting piece of Canadians’ inherited lore that was revealed to us last week with the announcement that, 170 years after they had been lost, one of the Franklin Expedition ships had been located in the high Arctic.
The leader of the expedition, Sir John Franklin, had been attempting to find a short cut through the Arctic Ocean to China which, had he been successful, would have been an enormous boon to British trade, especially had they been able to secure such a route and defend it for their exclusive use.
But this expedition, Franklin’s third attempt at finding the fabled “Northwest Passage” in a 30-year period proved catastrophic for the crews of his two ships and, of course, for the man himself, for they simply disappeared some time during the winter of 1846.
Captain Franklin’s widow was successful in being able to mount several attempts to find whoever might have survived, and so the story was kept alive in Britain but to no avail.
In the late years of the last century, archeologists found three sailors buried where their bodies had, presumably, been put off their ship. They were determined, by autopsy of the well-preserved remains, to have perished largely through lead poisoning (related to the soldering of the tin containers in which some of their rations had been kept).
So, for Canadians, the story has been kept alive and in England it has never gone away. In fact, the loss of the Franklin Expedition in its day has been likened to how the modern world would respond to the loss of a moon landing manned expedition.
Now we know where either the Erebus or the Terror lies and in due time, we’ll find out which of the ships lies below the Arctic seas as careful archeological research reveals the secrets the submerged ship has been harbouring for almost two centuries.
With Canadian troops once again committed to armed conflict as we will be sending troops to Iraq to, (for now) help train troops there as they deal with the Islamic militants intent on setting up a Muslim state in Iraq, Syria and beyond, it is good for our collective mental health to hear about a find like this remnant of the Franklin Expedition and know that as time goes on, much more will be revealed so this is a gift that will keep on giving. The search continues so we may well eventually be treated to news of the location of the other one of the pair of the lost explorer’s ships.
Great Britain, of which Canada is the successor state in our hemisphere, had already claimed through the business of the Hudson’s Bay Company all of Northern Ontario and west to the McKenzie River.
The Arctic was unknown and unclaimed territory by any European nation at that time and as Artic resources will as time goes on be more and more in play, the finding of tangible artifacts from a British Expedition attempting to negotiate the northwest passage gives Canada a little more claim on what we know is already part of our country.
It is also interesting that this ultimately successful mission to locate evidence of what became of the Franklin Expedition made use of the oral history of the Inuit people of the area, something that the British rescue missions in the aftermath of the loss of the Franklin ships chose not to do.
The finding of the Franklin ship, and all that it will reveal, is also noteworthy in that it came about by way of the cooperation of the federal government, Parks Canada and other agencies as well as Canadian philanthropists who helped finance the creation of the technology that helped a great deal in the current mission’s success.
All in all, this is a good news story for Canadians and should serve to divert our collective mind from more onerous topics.
