Louie Kamookak, one of the world’s many Franklin-obsessed amateur sleuths, has long wondered where in the Arctic the doomed British captain and his two shipwrecks lay.

But throughout decades of research, Kamookak had access to one vital resource aside from the usual books and maps: the testimony of his Inuit elders.

On Tuesday, when a team from Parks Canada announced they had discovered one of Franklin’s ships and ended a 166-year-old hunt, it confirmed what the Inuit oral histories have always said. One ship sank in shallow waters in an area called Utjulik, near an island to the west of what white men named the Adelaide Peninsula.

“I’m very pleased and happy,” Kamookak said in a phone interview from Gjoa Haven, Nunavut. “We can celebrate that in our time we have found one of the ships based on Inuit theories — I’m very grateful for that.”

When Franklin’s 1845 expedition to chart the Northwest Passage never returned, successive waves of searchers set out to find him. With all of Franklin’s men dead, there was just one group of humans with first-hand information as to what happened: the Inuit.

Their stories differed in the details but agreed on the major themes. Franklin’s men had abandoned their ships and set out on foot, only to perish over the following winters. As for the ships, one broke up in the ice and sank in deep water to the north, and a second ship floated south into shallower seas near two spits of land that looked like fingers, giving the local people a chance to collect useful materials from the vessel before it sank.

Early European and American searchers greeted the Inuit testimony with varying degrees of mistrust. David Woodman, a B.C. ferries captain and another amateur Franklin sleuth, wrote the book Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony to prove that the people of the Arctic passed on exceptionally accurate information through the generations.

“This is a vindication of the Inuit testimony, definitely,” Woodman said. Both he and Kamookak have communicated with the Parks Canada researchers over the years, and lead marine archeologist Ryan Harris also called the find a validation.

Conflicting details in the Inuit testimony — different witnesses pointed to different Utjulik islands, for example — are partly result of stories eroding over time, Kamookak said. But another complicating factor, Woodman says, was mistranslation on the part of white searchers, some of whom understood very little Inuktitut and all of whom translated Inuit units of travel — in days, for example — into imperial units in different ways.

Woodman says he is looking forward to learning the ship’s precise location, currently under wraps. “We will be able to reverse engineer what the Inuit actually meant, as opposed to what we were told they said.”

“The oral history is very strong, and it’s very strong even today,” said Kamookak.

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