ABOARD CCGS SIR WILFRID LAURIER—Like all great discoveries, they found the Franklin Expedition shipwreck by accident, after years of gruelling, monotonous work.

For 166 years, people have wondered where the Royal Navy’s HMS Erebus and HMS Terror went after they sailed into the Northwest Passage in search of the western exit, only to disappear, losing all 129 men aboard.









Witness accounts from Inuit who spoke to early searchers in the 19th century offered tantalizing clues of at least one ghost ship, with a big, dead white man aboard, drifting south on the ice.

They claimed it was far from the point where an 1847 ink note, concealed in a tin can, reported the ships had been abandoned, imprisoned in heavy ice. Many so-called experts thought it was hogwash. The Inuit had to be telling tall tales.

Turns out the Inuit were right all along.

But it took more than a century of searching, and a serendipitous series of events over the past several weeks, to prove it.

First, the heaviest Arctic sea ice in years had to block a flotilla of seven vessels, including smaller survey boats that carry high-tech submersibles — the largest mission ever assembled to search for Erebus and Terror.

Unable to group together in what looked like the more promising northern search zone in Erebus Bay, government and privately funded vessels had to spend more time south of Victoria Strait.

They kept cursing the ice.

Then a federal hydrographer charting the seabed had to offer helicopter seats to two archeologists working for the Nunavut government.

That way fate, and a Transport Canada pilot assigned to the Coast Guard, could deliver them to one barren Arctic island out of thousands.

And then that pilot, who took an interest in old things as he watched archeologists pick up artifacts over the years, had to do as they’d taught him.

While walking the perimeter in a neon orange dry suit and red tasselled toque, he kept his eyes to the grassless ground.

That’s why chopper pilot Andrew Stirling found the one critical clue that had eluded generations of searchers, and finally pointed archeologists to the sunken wreck from Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition.

“You almost think this ship wanted us to find it,” said Marc-Andre Bernier, chief of the underwater archeology team at Parks Canada, the lead federal agency in the Franklin hunt.

When Ryan Harris, a senior underwater archeologist, brought back the first sonar images of the wreck to show Bernier for official confirmation, “I cried,” he said. “We all did.

“You really have to have trust in yourself and in your colleagues,” added Bernier, who is into his 25th year on Parks Canada’s underwater archeology team.

“There’s constant pressure and scrutiny because we’re government. And it’s this quest: some people love it, some people think we shouldn’t be doing this. There are also people saying, ‘You’re not looking in the right place.’

“And the more you look, and the more you don’t find, the more criticism you can have.”

But the searchers stuck to a plan, which depended on what some might consider a crap shoot: several federal agencies working together, sharing information, compromising, and leaving egos ashore.

So they all share in the breakthrough, which happened quietly, far from any limelight, last week.

“This is truly a historic moment for Canada,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement Tuesday. “Franklin’s ships are an important part of Canadian history given that his expeditions, which took place nearly 200 years ago, laid the foundations of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.”

The federal and Nunavut experts who made the discoveries won’t say precisely when, or where, the discovery was made, because they want to keep what is now one of the hottest sites in marine archeology safe from looters.

It started out as Scott Youngblut’s mission.

Youngblut, 37, of Burlington, is hydrographer-in-charge with the Canadian Hydrographic Service, the federal agency that surveys the seabed of Canada’s waterways with 3D sonar to create navigation charts.

Less than 10 per cent of the Canadian Arctic has been charted to modern standards. So the area where the Franklin wreck was discovered wasn’t remotely safe for ships until hydrographers surveyed it in 2008, the first year of the current effort.

Youngblut needed to set up a GPS unit on land to improve the accuracy of the undersea surveys.

He wasn’t choosey about where, and two seats were open at the back of the Laurier’s Messerschmitt 105 chopper, so Youngblut invited terrestrial archeologists Douglas Stenton, 61, of Chatham, and Robert Park, 57, to come along.

Stenton is Nunavut’s director of heritage, and Park is an archeology professor at the University of Waterloo.

They catalogue sites across the High Arctic, often using laser equipment to map the locations of relics they find, so experts know what needs to be studied more carefully, and to be protected from tourists, climate change and other threats.

Stenton had a spot in mind that he wanted to visit. But it was only when Youngblut asked in mid-air that they agreed a small, flat island would be a good place to land.

Stenton went straight to work examining a tent ring, a tight circle of rocks where Inuit would have built a shelter, likely with seal skins. Stirling was walking the shore.

“In a short time, I’ve learned to look at the land in a whole new light,” the chopper pilot said. “So I was just walking, and out of the corner of my eye, something looked out of place from the rocks and tundra.”

He waved to Park to come over. Stenton followed. Stirling showed them the piece of iron which, as taught, he hadn’t touched.

“As soon as I saw it, I knew it was different than anything we’d ever seen before in terms of its size and its very clear shape,” Stenton said.

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Holding it in his left hand, Stenton said it was a shame there weren’t any broad arrows on the iron, the Royal Navy’s mark on its property.

“The heel of my hand was covering it,” Stenton said. “I opened my hand and there was not one broad arrow, but two broad arrows on it, stamped into the iron. And the number 12.

“So that was very exciting. We knew then that this was a Royal Navy fitting. We just went, ‘Wow. Fantastic.’”

Farther along the beach, Stirling found half-moon-shaped pieces of wood, about 30 centimetres in diameter. One was weathered grey, lying amid some rocks. Another piece, the same shape and size, was nearby. Large iron nails, forged by hand, were sticking out.

Again, he called the archeologists over.

At first, Stenton thought it might be from a cask. After talking to the marine experts, the land archeologists believe it’s more likely that the wooden pieces, which fit together, form a hawse plug.

It would have closed the hole in the deck where the anchor chain ran through into a lower locker to keep the sea out.

They brought the objects back to the Laurier’s archeology lab, where Ryan Harris, 42, and Jonathan Moore, 45, both senior underwater archeologists at Parks Canada in Ottawa, examined the objects that night.

The metal object, likely part of a davit used to lower one of several boats that Erebus and Terror carried, was a rusted piece of iron about 43 centimetres long, shaped like a large tuning fork with rounded tips.

It weighs about 4.5 kilograms, which makes it “the sort of artifact that wouldn’t be carried far, given its heft,” Harris said. “So it was a pretty good indication that we were in the right neighbourhood.”

Harris calls it “probably the most important, land-base archeology find in modern times” that’s conclusively linked to the lost Franklin Expedition.

It’s also something that Inuit hunters who criss-cross the Arctic, and carried away Franklin artifacts from other sites, didn’t find useful, Moore added.

They may also have stored it there, resting against the round rock on the opposite side to the sea, so it was easier to find, Park suggested.

If Inuit did see the heavy metal, and left it where Stirling found it, that choice helped prove accounts that a lot of experts were convinced Inuit were making up.

“It validates, in many ways, their testimony which, in some quarters, had been disputed,” Harris said. “And it also lends more weight to the more nuanced aspects of their testimony.”

The underwater archeologists soon put their survey and diving boat, Investigator, in the water to look for a wreck near the island, using a side-scan sonar towfish pulled on an armoured cable.

Before long, a telltale hit a few centimetres long appeared on the laptop computer screen as live images of the ice-scarred seabed scrolled by.

Technologist Chriss Ludin, 61, of Ottawa, had just handed the helm over to technician Joe Boucher, 33, also of Ottawa.

Harris and Moore, who normally work parallel searches on separate boats, were watching the same sonar feed this time.

“That’s it,” Harris said as the elusive shipwreck appeared. Like a winning sprinter, he raised two open hands.

“It wasn’t quite a primal scream,” Moore said, “but it was close.” There were high tens all around.

Once Bernier had confirmed the find, the next step was to get a remotely operated vehicle with high-resolution cameras down for a good look at the shipwreck.

As the archeology team and Laurier crew members raced to move out the sonar equipment and install the ROV control module in Investigator, icy winds blew in from the north, cutting across the icebreaker’s bow at 16 knots, gusting to 20.

When the Laurier’s crane lowered Investigator into the sea around 4:30 p.m. Sunday, the sun momentarily broke through the clouds.

They quickly closed again, turning the sky a wintry grey, as one-metre swells, topped by 30-centimetre wind waves, rocked the Parks Canada boat.

In rough seas, with night closing in, the archeologists were only able to view the wreck with their ROVs for about 40 minutes.

“We deployed the ROV to capture images, and to confirm that it was either Erebus or Terror,” Bernier added. “We’re not concerned which one it is at this point.”

The sunken ship is standing upright on the seabed, mainly intact except for her three, tall masts, which were likely sliced off by ice floes, the archeologist said.

“There are some deck planks missing and you can actually see openings on the deck and the hatchways,” Bernier said. “And there’s a lot of debris around, ‘dead-eyes,’ which are the circular items that support the masts.

“And two bronze cannons. So then we had more proof that it’s not an ordinary ship. The dimensions are confirmed. Everything is confirmed.”

The Laurier is now anchored off the Nunavut hamlet of Gjoa Haven, on the southeast corner of King William Island, far from the Franklin wreck site.

The icebreaker’s role as the main vessel in the Victoria Strait Expedition was due to end Sept. 12. But that was before the federal and Nunavut experts on board made history.

The archeologists are eager to return to the wreck and study it for as long as they can, before the fall gale season hits.

The decision about retasking the Laurier, or delaying more work on the wreck site for another year, is way above their pay scale. So they have to wait, and hope, which they are used to.

Capt. Bill Noon, the tall, even-tempered Coast Guard officer who commands the Laurier, knows how fickle Arctic seas are, how they can be calm and welcoming one minute, only to rise up and sucker punch like a big, soaking fist.

He’s watched a lot of plans come and go like the tides, knowing the Arctic will always have the last word. Talking about all the random things that had to go right for searchers to find the Franklin wreck brings a broad, boyish smile to the cautious seaman’s face.

“If it wasn’t for the ice, we never would have come down this way,” Noon said, in a rare moment of relaxation on the icebreaker’s bridge. “Nature decided for us, fortunately.”

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