[Archport] Copper clue may solve mystery of doomed Victorian Arctic expedition

[Alexandre Monteiro <no.arame@gmail.com>]

Copper clue may solve mystery of doomed Victorian Arctic expedition

The Guardian, 28/10/09

Find could help reveal fate of Sir John Franklin's ships that disappeared in hunt for North-West Passage

An engraving, circa 1844, of Erebus and Terror, the two ships used by Franklin on his ill-fated search for the North-West Passage. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

A few snippets of copper may be a vital clue towards solving one of Arctic exploration's most haunting mysteries: what happened to Sir John Franklin's two superbly equipped ships when he and all 150 members of his expedition died in the search for the North-West Passage more than 160 years ago?

The fate of the 1845 expedition haunted Victorian imagination, and accounts suggesting some of his starving men prolonged their lives by cannibalism destroyed the reputation of those sent to find them.

Expensive rescue expeditions continued for almost 20 years, spurred on by Franklin's formidable widow, Jane Griffin. Evidence confirming Franklin's death was only discovered in 1859. Dumped supplies were recovered along with personal possessions, letters describing his death and those of many of his senior officers, and finally bodies, but his twin ships – the Erebus and the Terror – have never been located.

Now, if he can borrow a Canadian government icebreaker for next summer's diving season, Robert Grenier, the archaeologist who has led the hunt for the past 30 years, believes he can close in on the Terror at last.

Analysis of sheet metal and clippings of copper, which he recovered last year from 19th-century Inuit summer hunting sites, have convinced him that they once formed the protective plating over the Terror's hull and that the ship lies deep beneath the icy water of a narrow inlet south of King William Island.

He is working in uncharted waters, and has named the islet where he found the metal Copper Island.

Grenier, the senior marine archaeologist at the Canadian parks service, will outline his discoveries later this week in a public lecture at the National Maritime Museum in London, and at the rededication of a monument in Greenwich to the doomed crews.

The handsome marble monument contains the bones of Lieutenant Henry le Vesconte, the only human remains from the expedition repatriated to Britain. He was found and identified by relatives from the gold fillings in his teeth in 1872. The following year, his remains were shipped home and placed in a monument honouring all members of the expedition.

When the memorial was recently dismantled, to be moved to the vestibule of the chapel of St Peter and St Paul within the old Royal Naval college at Greenwich, the inscribed casket containing Vesconte's bones was revealed together with a perfectly preserved Victorian cross of dried flowers buried with him.

Now aged 72, Grenier has been diving for decades in sub-zero waters – almost dying once when his equipment snagged on the wreck of a supply ship from one of the rescue missions – and searching the rocky shoreline with Inuit guides when the winter ice recedes.

After studying 19th-century Inuit oral testimony – which included eyewitness descriptions of starving, exhausted men staggering through the snow without condescending to ask local people how they survived in such a wilderness – he believes the 19th-century official accounts that all the surviving expedition members abandoned their ice-locked ships are wrong.

He believes both ships drifted southwards, with at least two crew remaining until the final destruction of their vessels. One broke up, but Inuit hunters arriving at their summer hunting grounds reported discovering another ship floating in fresh ice in a cove.

"They're not very strong on location or date," Grenier said. "They have all the space and time in the world, but what they reported seems quite clear."

The ship, probably the Terror, was very neat and orderly, but the Inuit found a tall dead man lying on the deck. They descended into the darkness of the hull with their seal-oil lamps, and Grenier believes they recovered the copper, which was more valuable than gold to them, and tools including shears from the ship's workshop with which to work it.

Hauntingly, they also reported that one of the masts was on fire. Grenier wonders if what they saw was the funnel from the galley still smoking from a meal cooked that morning, before the last of Franklin's men disappeared from history.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/28/john-franklin-expedition-robert-grenier