Original subtitles

It's the most ambitious expedition of its day

In 1845, British explorer Sir John Franklin

heads into the frozen wilderness of the Arctic

to conquer the fabled shortcut to the Orient:

the Northwest Passage

But this grand expedition would never return home

There is no story in the history of British exploration

that ends as tragically as this

129 men disappear off the face of the earth

Again and again,

searchers ventured into this icy wasteland,

an effort that continues to this day

Over time, a meager trail of clues emerged

Hints of illness, starvation, even cannibalism

But no sign of Franklin's two ships

What happened to them?

This maddening mystery has remained unsolved for 170 years

But now, archaeologists are mounting

a far-reaching modern search for Franklin's lost ships

Ships don't just disappear

If there is a Franklin expedition ship,

we will find that ship

Combining 21st-century technology

with previously dismissed eyewitness accounts,

they make an astonishing find

Jabbed my finger right at the screen

and kind of lunged for it and said,

"That's it, that's it!"

This amazing journey into the Arctic

could solve a mystery 170 years in the making

and rewrite the history of exploration

Search for the "Arctic Ghost Ship," right now on NOVA.

The Canadian Arctic

As the summer of 2014 comes to an end

the ice is closing in

Working from icebreakers, a team of wreck hunters

is scouring the ocean floor with their sonar equipment

They're searching for two ships

believed to have sunk in these frozen waters

in the 19th century

This high-tech mission is only the latest

in a long history of failed attempts

to solve a perplexing mystery

What happened to the British explorer Sir John Franklin

and his crew of 128 fine sailors

when they sailed two heavily fortified ships

into this Arctic wasteland

and then vanished off the face of the earth?

That question has gone unanswered for 170 years

And now, after weeks of searching,

yet another effort, like all those before it,

seems on the verge of failure

Are you worried about that ice coming in?

That's not good

In just days, these seas could freeze over completely

Are you going to stop it?

Yeah

So, let's head back towards the ship

Their window is closing

The mystery has its origins in 1845,

as two great ships leave England on a historic quest

to map the fabled Northwest Passage

European traders had long understood

that the most direct route to the Orient lay to the west,

if only they could find a way over the Americas

Why not go over the top?

The world narrows as you go up

Go across the top of North America

And so the idea was to find

what they called the Northwest Passage

The approaches from both the Atlantic and Pacific

were already surveyed

But in between, the charts showed a mysterious gap,

an area that had defied explorers for centuries

So in 1845, Sir John Franklin set out to find once and for all

whether the gap could be bridged

and to claim the passage for the British Empire

The fact that there's an empty space on the chart,

a terra incognita,

that's both appealing, but also an insult

to the British Navy

They need to fill in the lines on the map

There's power in the ink lines that are drawn on charts

It's ownership

It's sovereignty

It's politics

To conquer the Northwest Passage,

the Navy put together the best equipped

Arctic expedition there had ever been

Sir John Franklin, a veteran of the Arctic,

was chosen to lead

Sir John Franklin was one of the two or three

outstanding polar navigators

of the first half of the 19th century

He combined experience, scientific expertise,

and a proven track record as a leader of men

59-year-old Franklin had led two previous Arctic expeditions

to survey the coastline of the North American mainland

During one trip, when supplies ran low,

the crew had to eat anything they could to survive,

and Franklin became affectionately known

as "the man who ate his own boots"

This time, he was better prepared

He and his crew of 128 men

sailed on two specially adapted former warships:

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

These young men had left behind their loved ones

in pursuit of the greatest prize in Arctic exploration

They knew the ships would encounter ice,

so the hulls were strengthened with oak planking

up to eight feet thick and reinforced with iron plate

Plans from the National Maritime Museum in London

show they were also fitted with innovations

such as coal-powered steam propulsion,

a retractable propeller, and even central heating

The ships were stocked with three years of food rations,

a library,

even musical instruments to help pass the time

They were better equipped than any previous expedition

But how prepared could they really be

for a world about which they knew so little?

It was very much

the dark side of the moon

as far as the Victorians were concerned

It was somewhere that had fascinated men

for hundreds of years,

but they'd never mastered the environment

In July 1845, a whaling ship recorded a final sighting

of the expedition in Baffin Bay, west of Greenland

From there, they sailed into oblivion

In the 170 years since then,

despite scores of well-equipped search attempts,

only a few meager clues have been found,

and no trace of the ships

In 2014, a crack team of wreck hunters

embarks on a fresh search

Writer and historian John Geiger

has been obsessed with the mystery for decades

To him, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance

to lay the ghosts of the Franklin expedition to rest

Been involved in one way or another with Franklin

since my 20s

It's the greatest mystery in exploration history

There's nothing that compares with it

It's really important from a historical standpoint

to understand what happened to them

Only by finding the wrecks

can crucial questions be answered

Exactly why did the expedition fail?

And how far through the Northwest Passage did they get?

It won't be easy

The wrecks remain lost,

largely because searching these icy waters

is such a difficult and dangerous task

In recent years, the government of Canada and its partners

have mounted several expeditions,

deploying icebreakers and sonar equipment

to hunt down the wrecks

But these costly missions have another purpose

As global warming melts the ice,

interest in extracting the Arctic's natural resources

will likely grow

These surveys will allow safer navigation here

in the years to come

These vessels host a diverse taskforce

led by the underwater archaeology team

of Parks Canada

This is actually our sixth field season

searching for Franklin's lost ships

We're hoping that there's going to be a payday

down the road here

Despite the calm exterior,

the team is desperate for a breakthrough

In the last six years, they've searched

close to 500 square miles of seafloor and found nothing

They have two key search zones

One, in the north,

is based on clues found by earlier search parties

Further south, a second zone is based on sightings of a ship

preserved in the oral history of local Inuit populations

But even after six years,

there's still a huge area to search

In the north, sea ice often lingers through the summer,

so plenty of this area remains unsurveyed

This year, they hope to put that right

We're looking in the very place

where Erebus and Terror were last reported

by the men who sailed those ships

You know, if you lose your keys,

you generally go back and look for them

in the last place you remember seeing them

By combining the last known position of the ships

with information on prevailing currents,

the team has drawn up a northern search zone

of some 540 square miles

So how will they search such a huge expanse of seafloor

during the brief Arctic summer?

This year, for the first time, they have a secret weapon

It's basically an unmanned torpedo

that we can deploy pre-programmed

and it will literally go out in the sea,

follow the route that we've asked it to follow,

gather data, and come back with that data

This is the Arctic Explorer,

a precision piece of military hardware

that uses sonar to scan a square mile of seafloor

in just an hour

The sonar itself,

which is an acoustic system,

that will send a signal to the bottom and recapture it

to give a picture of what's on the bottom

It produces images like this,

showing the seafloor in incredible detail

Any sign of a ship would show up immediately

But if there's any hint of ice, the team will have to pull

this delicate instrument out of the water

The last thing they need

is to lose their best search vehicle

For the first two weeks of the search,

drifting ice floes have prevented them

from deploying the Arctic Explorer

But their luck may be about to change

We're seeing a growing surface area of open water

A small window in the ice is an opportunity

to deploy the Arctic Explorer for the first time

It's a risk,

but just one pass could be enough to reveal a wreck

It looks like we should try to get into action

Wary of rogue ice floes,

the team will track the submersible

every step of the way

For several hours, it will track up and down the search zone,

scanning an area of a few square miles

Only when the sub returns can they access the images,

hoping against hope for a glimpse of a wreck

When Franklin set sail in 1845, he was aware that his ships

could be trapped in sea ice for at least one winter

But in 1847, after two years with no word,

Lady Jane Franklin put pressure on the authorities

to start looking for her husband and his crew

Rescue missions were sent from Britain and America

And in 1850, near the entrance to the Northwest Passage,

a joint search team turned up the first clue

Graves

Of three sailors who had died

during Franklin's very first winter in the Arctic

Even in the 1840s,

this many fatalities so early in a mission was unusual

This shouldn't happen

Three men should not die

in the first winter of an Arctic expedition

They've only been out of Britain six months

What's killing them?

With Erebus and Terror stuck in the ice,

these graves indicate Franklin's expedition

spent their first winter here at Beechey Island,

well north of the modern search zone

Overwintering was something they'd anticipated

Burying three of their crew was not

One of the graves was marked with a quote from the Bible

"Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; consider your ways"

Puzzling

It's ominous

Has something gone wrong?

Do they sense that something is going to go wrong

for the rest of the expedition?

Over a century later, in 1984, archaeologists exhume the bodies

to try and work out how they died

The corpses were shockingly well-preserved

in the frozen ground

Tests revealed high levels of lead in their systems

Lead was a common pollutant in 19th-century England

But it could also have come from piping

in the ship's water system,

or even from the solder used to seal canned food

Innovations designed to protect the men

from the rigors of the Arctic

But the tests didn't prove

that lead poisoning was the cause of death,

so this clue only deepened the mystery

In the search zone,

the Arctic Explorer has scanned a few square miles

near the last position of Erebus and Terror

recorded by the crew

Back on the ship, the team downloads the data

to get their first glimpse of the Arctic seafloor

As you can see,

there's not a lot of features in this particular area

So, this is sterile completely

There's nothing, right?

Yeah

With no discoveries in the first pass,

they're eager to press on with the search

But there's a problem:

the ice, which had briefly opened up, is back

As hard as it may be to believe,

this is somewhere in the Arctic

In parts of the Arctic,

this is as good as it's going to get this year

Global warming means the amount of summer sea ice in the Arctic

is in long-term decline

But from one year to the next, the picture is far more complex

Just because there's a warming trend due to global warming

doesn't mean that you won't have variations

Modern-day ships can still encounter difficult ice

because the year-to-year variations

in this part of the world can be just extreme

You can go from no ice one summer

to completely landlocked ice,

where the ice goes from coast to coast, in another summer

It's hard to predict

The Arctic has always been an incredibly variable place

In 2014, unusually extensive sea ice

is now threatening to shut down the search here entirely

It's frustrating because the team is so close

to the suspected last location of Franklin's ships

But how do we know these crucial coordinates?

After the discovery of graves in 1850,

several more search expeditions were sent to the Arctic

And in 1859, nearly 15 years after Franklin set sail,

the next tantalizing clue was found on King William Island,

nearly 400 miles south of the burial site

Here, in a stone cairn, men of the Franklin expedition

had left a single, handwritten note

The note, an incredible document

of the fate of the Franklin crews

How can a piece of paper hold fortune in its hands?

This is the most important object that has been recovered

This precious piece of the Franklin puzzle

is now held at the National Maritime Museum in London

It was standard naval practice

to issue these kind of notes with a standard blank form

that would be filled in when necessary

The notes were then placed in tubes like these

They could be just left

for people to find information about the expedition

The note explains that from Beechey Island,

the expedition sailed over 350 miles south

to coordinates near the coast of King William Island

Here, the men spent their second winter in the Arctic,

and the message ends with the upbeat words "all well"

But scrawled around the edge of the note is another message,

written a whole year later

A shocking turn of events

that must have filled the surviving men with despair

Franklin was dead

There's no mention of how he died,

but the note goes on to say

that nine officers and 15 sailors had also passed away

Something was going seriously wrong

The loss of any leader in the middle of an expedition

isn't good news

Particularly so when you're stranded

in the middle of nowhere in a hostile environment

The captain of HMS Terror, Francis Crozier,

was now in command, and he had a problem

His note implies that rather than breaking up,

the sea ice remained frozen solid

throughout the summer of 1847

The ships were trapped,

and the men faced yet another winter

stuck in the heart of the Arctic

So, why had the ice failed to melt?

Climate scientists collect and study ice core samples

to reconstruct past weather conditions

During warm summers, ice on the surface will melt,

leaving characteristic pale bands in the core

But dark areas, lacking in these distinct pale bands,

indicate times with far colder summers

And ice core data shows that the Franklin expedition

coincided with a period of at least 30 years

with especially frigid conditions

Based on the ice core record,

the Franklin era was the least favorable

in terms of ice conditions in the past 700 years

This period was unusually cold, and so he really was unlucky

with the timing of his expedition

Just an unfortunate confluence of events,

and it's nothing that he could have anticipated

Mother Nature had dealt a cruel blow

But with the fate of 105 ailing men in his hands,

the note reveals that Captain Crozier

decided to make his move

He ordered the men to abandon the ships

and march south toward Back's Fish River,

knowing that beyond there was a British trading post

Setting off, they faced a daunting trek

of over a thousand miles to reach it

Exactly why he attempted that journey

or whether he really believed they could make it,

the note doesn't say

It is the most enigmatic of clues

It's just enough to locate them in the landscape

It's just enough to tell you

that something terrible has happened

It's just enough to point you

in the right direction to follow them

But there's so many things that are not there

The coordinates in Crozier's note

are the basis for the team's northern search zone

But winds and currents mean

the ships could have ended up anywhere within this huge area

And in 2014, sea ice has plagued that area all summer

It's been a sort of cat-and-mouse game

We feel like we have a break, we feel like we have a shot,

and then the ice shifts and the doors close

In a couple of weeks, these seas could freeze over completely

Knowing that time is short,

the team sends up a helicopter to find gaps in the ice

You can get to our position right here

It's at least eight to ten miles in open water

Actually, that's excellent

The good news is that to the north of us,

there is a large opening

And this is right where we want to be

It's right in the primary search zone,

so essentially, we have a shot here

We're waiting to launch the first mission of the day

We're going to look at a first block of four kilometers long

There we go

Now the waiting starts

Do you have a visual on it now?

But just an hour into the search,

ice is spotted

drifting across the Arctic explorers' path,

and the run is aborted

This morning, we had a window,

and very rapidly, that opening closed on us from all sides

The ice is moving quickly around us again,

capturing us, trapping us

The northern search zone is huge,

and the ice makes for slow progress

With time running short,

the team abandons this area in favor of the southern zone,

where there's less ice and some additional clues

The team began looking here six years ago

based on eyewitness accounts of the plight of Franklin's men

preserved by Inuit oral tradition

Oral tradition is a very important aspect

of Inuit culture and Inuit life

That's how we learn about where to go and get the food,

or you may know about these ice conditions in the springtime

Oral history had to be very, very accurate,

because if it was not, it could mean death

According to Inuit accounts, expedition survivors

were spotted many times as they marched south

Those sightings were later passed on to search parties,

including one remarkable story gathered in 1869

by American explorer Charles Francis Hall

It describes a dramatic face-to-face encounter

between the Inuit and one group of Franklin's men

According to the story, an officer walked forward,

shouting the Inuit word for friend

Some believe this was Captain Crozier,

who had learned some Inuit words on a previous expedition

The Inuit provided seal meat for his starving crew

But there was no way they could support so many men,

so the Inuit left, knowing that sharing any more of their food

would have been suicide

So the men continued to march southward

According to Inuit accounts,

they dragged small boats laden with supplies

If they stop, they die

So they walk and they pick themselves up

and they try and head south,

pulling the ships' boats behind them

The word "cold" as we know it takes on a different meaning

You feel like you want to roll up in a fetal ball

all the time

You become inactive, weak-willed,

you don't want to do anything

other than sort of creep into some place

where there's no wind and no cold

It was a horrific ordeal for the malnourished crew

But Hall's report wasn't the first time

Inuit accounts of the expedition had reached England

In 1854, the explorer Sir John Rae

spent time with another group of Inuit,

who described a particularly grisly discovery

When the story was reported in the British press,

all hell broke loose

So this is 1854

This is The Times, October the 23rd,

and here's John Rae's letter in all its gory detail

"The bodies of some 30 persons were discovered

"Some were in a tent, others under the boat,

"which had been turned to form a shelter

"From the mutilated state of many of the corpses

"and from the contents of the kettles,

"it is evident that our wretched countrymen

"had been driven to the last resource:

cannibalism as a means of prolonging existence"

It's a horrendous, horrific truth

for a Victorian public to hear

Heroes don't eat each other, least of all naval heroes

To many in Britain, the stories of cannibalism were an insult

And none other than Charles Dickens

leapt to the men's defense

He dismissed the Inuit accounts

as "the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people,

with a domesticity of blood and blubber"

But in 1992, archaeologist Anne Keenleyside

carried out extensive research on bones

that had just been discovered

on the coast of King William Island

Fragments of fabric and buttons found with them

indicated that they were members of Franklin's crew

This site map shows the distribution of the bones

that we uncovered at the site

On this end of the site, there is a scattering of bones

They're fairly widely scattered

And then, as we move towards this end of the site,

you see a dense concentration of bones in this area here

The first bone in which I identified a cut mark

was a left pelvic bone

I turned it over, uncovered it, lifted it up from the soil,

and found a distinct cut mark

clearly identifiable as a mark that was not made by an animal

These kinds of human-made cut marks

tend to have a V-shaped cross-section,

depending on the shape of the blade

These marks appear as though they were made by metal knives

used to strip flesh from human bones

in a last desperate bid to survive

It seemed to corroborate the Inuit accounts of cannibalism

In its disgust, 19th-century Britain

had rejected those stories as unreliable folklore

But in doing so, they'd also overlooked important clues

to the whereabouts of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

The Inuit told explorers that one of Franklin's ships

was crushed by the ice

before sinking off King William Island

But oral traditions also preserve clues

about the fate of the second ship,

which supposedly remained intact

Could this information help to narrow down the search?

Here on modern-day King William Island,

Louie Kamookak has spent 30 years compiling information

passed down through the generations

He discovered clues embedded in Inuit culture itself

With the elders involved,

we collected all the place names in this region

because place name is one way oral history is passed down

Oral history is passed down by speaking, telling stories,

but it's also in the place names

There's places like, past Simpson Strait,

a Boat Place

That's the story where one of the ships was

when it was still afloat

That's why it called a Boat Place

This "Boat Place" is found

well south of King William Island

Based on that and other Inuit accounts,

Parks Canada has drawn up its southern search zone

And with the north blocked by ice,

all efforts are now focused here

So, what do we have?

A detailed oral history

that really, you know, helps us define where to start looking

It were not for information provided by the Inuit,

we would have no reason to start looking for Franklin's ships

down in the Wilmott and Crampton Bay

Teams from Parks Canada and the Arctic Research Foundation

have scoured the seafloor here in recent years

And that work continues now, using towed sonar units

That's the safety cable for the sonar

We don't want to lose it

The data comes in live,

so team members keep their eyes glued to the screens

Winter is coming, and their search window will soon close

But just as hopes are beginning to fade,

exciting news comes from a different source entirely

For many years, a separate team

led by anthropologist Doug Stenton

has also been looking for clues on land

In 2014, they're combing small islands

in the southern search zone for evidence of Franklin's men

And on September 1,

it's helicopter pilot Andrew Sterling

who makes a stunning find

Just walking on the beach,

sort of something caught my eye at the side

and it just looked out of place, the color behind a rock,

so I just went over to investigate it

Could this be the breakthrough the team has been hoping for?

We all looked at it and went, "Well, this is from a ship"

We didn't know what it was

We're not marine archaeologists, per se,

but we all thought this just has that

you know, we all just sensed it

The object is stamped with characteristic marks

known as broad arrows,

signifying British Royal Navy property

It was just unmistakable, what the significance was

An indisputable indication that this came from a Royal Navy ship

and undeniably from either Erebus or Terror.

The object is quickly identified from the ship's plans

as the metal fitting

that supports one of the ship's cranes

And it was found in the heart of the southern search area,

close to the Inuit sightings

This large iron object,

very close to where the Inuit report

that they encountered one of these ships

To find this in that vicinity

is very, very exciting, and it really told us

that we were barking up the right tree

At last, it all seems to be coming together

This find is the most important discovery

since the cairn note over 150 years ago

Are they finally on the verge of solving the Franklin puzzle?

With winter approaching

and their search window closing fast,

the Parks Canada team

scrambles to scan the surrounding seafloor

My colleague and I were manning the side-scan sonar station

We were both looking at the sonar monitor,

and there it comes

And you have this really unmistakable outline

of a shipwreck

No doubt what it was

Started to scroll down the monitor

And it wasn't even halfway onto the screen

before you really knew what you were looking at

Jabbed my finger right at the screen

and kind of lunged for it and said,

"That's it, that's it!"

When I saw the image

of the ship coming down, I just

it cut my legs, literally

"Oh, my God, this is going to be a treasure trove of information,

"and we are going to really open up a window

directly into history"

It's a pivotal moment in the Franklin story

Thanks to the Inuit oral history

and, ironically, to the ice that forced them south,

the team has finally located one of Franklin's long-lost ships

This is a great moment for exploration

We've been searching for, you know, 160 years

for answers to what happened to the Franklin expedition

The best equipped, most finely prepared and trained expedition

that had ever set out for the Northwest Passage,

and to have it literally obliterated,

end in mass disaster, no survivors and no ships,

it's been a confounding mystery

To finally have something significant,

to finally have a ship, is just incredible

I've spent most of my adult life dreaming of this day,

and, you know, it's here

Scientists have located one of the ships

from the fabled Franklin expedition

found one of two ships

used to search for the Northwest Passage

teams have finally hit the jackpot

So an absolutely incredible day for those people,

some of whom have spent, you know,

a good chunk of their life's work

For underwater archaeologists

Marc-André Bernier and Ryan Harris,

it's the find of a lifetime

But they're desperate for a closer look,

so before the seas freeze for another winter,

they dive down to see the ship with their own eyes

I'd caught a glimpse of the timber on the seafloor

Followed along its length

Just growing in anticipation and excitement,

and then, you know, boom!

Towering overhead, out of the haze,

loomed the bulk of this stately shipwreck

a full five meters tall

That sensation of finally laying a hand

on the side of this storied shipwreck

is quite a remarkable experience that I'll never forget

The wreck lies just 36 feet below the surface,

but murky water and piles of broken planks

make it difficult to see

Among the timbers, a familiar shape catches the eye

Is that a gun?

It's a cannon

Incredible!

Is that two of them?

Yeah

There's so much to see, it boggles the mind

Directly over the wreck, the Canadian Hydrographic Service

carries out more sonar work

to create a virtual image of the entire site

The masts have been swept away by drifting sea ice,

but the hull of the ship is in one piece

Holes in the deck even allow the divers

to get their first look inside the ship

And you could look forward and see murky features

Just an incredible sensation of being inside

That's where they would have spent long, harrowing winters

through the dark Arctic nights

It's just an absolutely remarkable sight,

and the fact that it still stands intact,

it allows you to sort of place yourself there

You feel this connection with the past

It's really quite astonishing

To cap it all off, there is one last prize

And I hear John call over on the headset, saying,

"You're not going to believe this, but I found the bell"

And I thought I must have misheard him,

but sure enough, I went over and there was the ship's bell,

lying in plain sight, right on top of the upper deck

Embossed on the side is the year that Franklin set sail: 1845

A poignant reminder of the terrible events

that played out on this ship 170 years ago

Today was an extraordinary day

I've never had the like of it in my entire career,

and I probably never will after this day

This wreck site without a doubt

is one of the most extraordinary things I've ever laid eyes on

It is absolutely an underwater archaeologist's dream

To identify which ship they've found,

the team takes measurements

from the high-resolution sonar data

This image here kind of shows

a good perspective

for extracting length measurements

According to the 1845 plans

from the National Maritime Museum,

the dimensions of Erebus and Terror

were subtly different

Carefully comparing the sonar image with the plans,

only one of the ships is a perfect match

The wreck must be HMS Erebus, Franklin's flagship

The sonar data is used to produce

this three-dimensional reconstruction

The wreck will be explored in great detail

in years to come,

but it's already produced an extraordinary idea

that could rewrite the history of Franklin's expedition

Both ships were originally thought to have been abandoned

off King William Island, much further north,

so how did Erebus move 100 miles to the south?

So where the wreck of Erebus is found,

it actually happens to be protected,

almost surrounded by a barrier of small islands and islets

What we ask ourselves

is how this ship arrived at that location

Satellite imagery from the Canadian Ice Service

shows that ice in this area

tends to drift south with the wind

Could this have carried Erebus south?

Or might there be another explanation?

You see the tendril of ice

coming down the bottom of the screen,

and that's being expelled into the Queen Maud Gulf

So it's not terribly surprising that at least one of the ships

ultimately would have been directed

towards Wilmott and Crampton Bay

What is less clear, however, is how it could have gotten through

this tangled web of small islands and shoals,

how it worked itself into a protective pocket

of where we find it today

Harris and Bernier believe it's unlikely

that the ice could drag a ship intact

through the maze of reefs and shoals

But there is a more plausible idea

suggested by a further clue in the Inuit accounts

When Erebus was last seen above water,

smoke was rising from the ship as if it were inhabited

Had some of the crew returned to the ship

from their attempted march south,

and could they have steered her to where she now lies?

It's a possibility that might rewrite the history

of the expedition

The ships had already navigated

through a significant stretch of the Northwest Passage

to reach King William Island,

but the wreck lies close to the mainland,

where the coast had already been surveyed

by previous expeditions coming from the west

So if survivors did pilot Erebus to this spot,

they had bridged the gap on the charts

and completed the goal of their mission

Now these men, that last surviving band,

a final fire before the flame goes out

These men have, in effect, completed the final link

in the chain of the Northwest Passage

But that is so far from their minds at that moment

These men are thinking nothing of fame or records

They're thinking of the following day

Inuit accounts mention a few sets

of what they called white men's footsteps heading inland

A last trace of the remaining souls

In navigating the ship to where it now lies,

those men may have found the final link

of the elusive Northwest Passage

Whether they succeeded or not,

the wreck of HMS Erebus is a monument to exploration

and to the sacrifice of all 129 men

of Franklin's lost expedition