ABOARD THE CCGS SIR WILFRID LAURIER—For generations, searchers have battled frostbite, scurvy, howling storms, exhaustion and gut-churning seas trying to find the remains of Sir John Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition.

The accommodations, and the technology, have improved considerably since the first expedition went looking for Franklin and his 128 men soon after they were declared overdue in 1848.

But the Arctic never gives up her secrets easily.

For all the electronic wizardry that a Canadian flotilla of up to seven manned vessels and two autonomous underwater vehicles are carrying to comb the depths of Victoria Strait, searchers are still at the mercy of the elements.

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No one knows that better than Ryan Harris and Jonathan Moore, senior underwater archeologists at Parks Canada, who have been looking for Erebus and Terror since 2008.

It’s gruelling work, and a simple hope keeps them going: if they can just find the wrecks, and if they rest in waters that aren’t too deep, Harris and Moore— the current effort’s most experienced veterans — can finally dive and do some archeology.

And then they might find answers to a question that has nagged generations: why did no one survive the biggest, and best equipped, mission that the Royal Navy had mounted to explore the Arctic?

Every August, when the ice usually starts its brief breakup, the two professional divers spend long days bucking Arctic waves in small boats, staring at sonar images that constantly scroll down a laptop screen like digital waterfalls.

Harris and Moore started this search season on Aug. 16 aboard the Arctic Research Foundation’s 64-foot Martin Bergmann, surveying the sea floor in Wilmot and Crampton Bay, on the eastern end of Queen Maud Gulf.

After three days of working around the clock in shifts and bunking just below the converted Newfoundland fishing trawler’s wheelhouse, they went ashore at Nunavut’s Cambridge Bay, hauling several hundred kilos of gear in eight duffels and cases.

Then they boarded the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier to start another leg of the search.

Now there’s only a couple of weeks before the search window slams shut. The Laurier has to pick up other duties and then start making its way to home port in Victoria, B.C., before the ice closes in and the Arctic gale season reaches full fury.

That means Harris and Moore have to push through bad weather, gathering and analyzing gigabytes of data by the day from a torpedo-shaped sonar device called a towfish.

“It’s not like watching television for 14 or 16 hours and being interested in what you see,” Harris says, looking tired just from the thought. “You’re controlling the depth of the towfish, and trying to maintain a fairly consistent altitude over the sea floor as the terrain undulates up and down.”

It can be nauseating. It’s always exhausting.

“About halfway through the day, into Day 5, 6 or 7, you look like a zombie,” Harris says.

“Your eyes close, and flash open again, and you go, ‘Was I just asleep? If so, for how long?’ So of course, we review all our data to make sure we haven’t missed anything. Our greatest fear, in a way, is that we’ve passed over something and somehow not seen it.”

The Royal Navy’s Admiralty sent the Franklin Expedition to the High Arctic in 1845 with orders to find the final stretch of the Northwest Passage, which would open a shorter shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which also carried three pets — a female monkey that the crew called Jacko, Neptune the Newfoundland dog and a cat of unknown name — were last seen by two ships hunting whales near Baffin Bay on July 26, 1845.

The key, but brief, record of the expedition was discovered in 1859 by Royal Navy Lieutenant William Hobson on the northwestern shore of King William Island, hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle.

Suffering frostbite and scurvy, squinting against sun blindness and barely able to walk through icy gales on painfully swollen feet and legs, Hobson and his small team found a stone cairn, almost two meters high, near Victory Point.

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At the base, sealed in a tin, was a note written in ink on an Admiralty form that asked anyone who found it to report the contents.

Dated May 28, 1847, it described their circumnavigation of Cornwallis Island and gave the longitude and latitude of the spot where the expedition had overwintered.

“All well,” it declared.

A second message, dated April 25, 1848, and written in a shakier hand around the margins, gave curt details that only hinted at a catastrophe.

The ships had been deserted three days earlier after two winters of being locked in ice, it read. Franklin had died on June 11, 1847. Of what, the note didn’t say. The death toll so far: nine officers and 15 crewmen.

The expedition’s remaining men would start the next day for Back’s Fish River, far to the southeast, the note ended. It placed the abandoned ships at five leagues, or roughly 27 kilometres, north-northwest of their landfall, south of Victory Point.

That means the ships were left somewhere at the vast northern end of Victoria Strait where, in recent days, strong currents and stiff winds out of the north have been compressing huge ice floes into a massive barrier that has blocked searchers.

The thickening wall of ice now stands between dozens of experts from several federal agencies who are collaborating in the Victoria Strait Expedition as it takes another shot at finding Franklin’s sunken ships.

While they wait for a wind shift that could quickly break up the ice and open a path to the northern search area, considered the most promising place to find at least one the shipwrecks, the expedition has started looking further south in Queen Maud Gulf.

Tom Zagon, an analyst at the Canadian Ice Service, studied satellite images to calculate that if Erebus and Terror moved with the regular flow of ice in Victoria Strait, they likely ended up somewhere south of their last known position.

Like the legions who have hunted for Erebus and Terror before them, today’s searchers are adding new, more detailed pieces to the map of Canada’s poorly charted Arctic as they hunt for the wrecks.

Less than 10 per cent of Canada’s Arctic waters have been charted to modern standards.

As the Arctic climate warms, marine traffic is increasing, raising the risk of accidents in seas cold enough to kill a person in minutes, long before rescuers are likely to arrive.

The Victoria Strait Expedition includes teams from Parks Canada, the Canadian Hydrographic Service, which surveys and charts our waters, the Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Navy, with support from the Canadian Space Agency.

The Government of Nunavut is also involved in the hunt and, true to the long tradition of searching for the Franklin expedition, private money plays a big part.

The Arctic Research Foundation, founded by former Blackberry chief Jim Balsillie, and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society have provided ships to aid in the quest.

“We’re feeding off each other, working together, and trying to help each other out,” says Adrian Schimnowski, project manager for the Arctic Research Foundation.

Fifty years ago, Parks Canada’s John Rick saw so many amateur archeologists and plain scavengers diving to bring up valuable artifacts that he realized Canada needed a professional unit.

In canals, rivers, lakes and oceans across Canada, the eight-person team studies several sites a year. The Franklin Expedition is their highest-profile, and so far, most elusive project.

Around the same time that the dive team was being set up, federal government sleuthing for Erebus and Terror began above the water line.

The Department of Mines and Technical Surveys deployed staffers in heavy fur parkas on the ice-covered Queen Maud Gulf, where the search continues today.

Riding snowmobiles, they pulled large wooden sleds mounted with magnetometers that tried to detect the abundant iron in the Franklin ships’ reinforced hulls or the locomotives that were installed as early marine steam engines.

In 1967, to mark Canada’s Centennial, the military put divers in thin wetsuits from the 1st Field Squadron, Royal Canadian Engineers, to look for Erebus and Terror among ice floes off O’Reilly Island.

“Basically, they were tied on the end of a rope and pulled by a boat,” Harris says.

He and Moore speak with reverence of the divers, who they know only as Lt. Critchley and Cpl. Shaw from the caption of an old black-and white-photograph. The cold shock on their faces makes you shiver almost half a century later.

“It’s called a ‘towed diver search,’” Moore says. “We used to do that a lot in the St. Lawrence River in frigid water — in dry suits. So we know what these guys went through in 1967 with wetsuits. They must have been frozen.”

Harris and Moore are burning for a chance to take their dives and bring the long, torturous story of the lost Franklin Expedition to a close.

“We’ve certainly had more than enough of looking,” Harris says.

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