It was a mystery that confounded and haunted Victorian imaginations: what happened to Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, his two ships Erebus and Terror, and 128 crew members during their fateful voyage of 1845.

On 2 September 2014, the Erebus and its macabre cargo was found in 10 metres of icy water off the coast of King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. Its deck was littered with artefacts, including glass from Franklin’s cabin windows and the hearth brush from his coal-fired stove.

Sir John Franklin.

Last year, as an exhibition on the discovery was being prepared in Canada, the Terror was found – and in even better condition.

Skeletons had been found over the previous century scattered along the frozen coast where the crew died after abandoning their ice locked ships. Many bones showed clear marks of butchery, bearing out Inuit reports of cannibalism among the starving men, which Franklin’s widow and sections of Victorian society had furiously rejected.

Dozens of objects from Erebus, including willow pattern dinner plates, a glass bottle of preserved ginger recycled to hold lead shot, and a bronze framed piece of domed glass used to filter light down to the lower decks, have returned to London for the first time since the ships sailed from the Thames on 19 May 1845.



A major exhibition telling one of the most tragic stories in the history of polar exploration, jointly created by the Canadian Museum of History, the National Maritime Museum, and Parks Canada – whose archaeologists found the ships in a search that began in 2008 – opens on 14 July in Greenwich.

So far only robot submarines have explored Terror, which lies eerily preserved with all its decks and the ship’s wheel still in place, in deeper colder water. In the next two months – during the window for marine excavation before the winter ice closes in – archaeologist Marc Andre Bernier hopes to become the first man in more than 150 years to stand on its deck.

His team will also be returning for further work on Erebus, his first encounter with which he vividly recalls. “The hull is just huge – it’s like confronting a two-storey building made of oak. Because the objects from it are so personal, and because we know the end, but not what happened before that, it’s not just a ship, it’s a story. It was a haunting experience.”

HMS Terror was found in pristine condition at the bottom of an Arctic bay. Photograph: Arctic Research Foundation

The central question remains unanswered: what doomed the largest and best-equipped expedition ever sent from the UK to find the fabled North-west Passage trade route to the east. The exhibition brings together all the evidence, including scientific study of the bones that revealed a gruesome detail – defensive cut marks on hands and arms suggesting that some of those cannibalised were killed for the purpose.

Postmortems were carried out in the 1980s on the first three crew members to die. Their bodies were buried in coffins on Beechey Island and perfectly preserved in permafrost – life-size photographs discreetly screened off in the exhibition reveal startling detail. When the men died the expedition probably had at least two years’ more stores on the ships. The results showed that all had high lead levels, but probably not enough to kill them, and two had tuberculosis, but that was probably survivable.

It has been suggested that many died of scurvy, or botulism poisoning from tainted canned supplies. But jars of lime juice and pickles were found, and when some Inuit opened and ate tinned supplies when the abandoned ships were still afloat they said the contents were fine.

The only documentation ever discovered was a single sheet found in 1859 buried under a cairn by one of 30 rescue missions sent to recover the men or at least explain their loss. It said that Franklin himself had died on 11 June 1847, and that the surviving crew were abandoning the ships. Even if all those crew had lived, the 24 who had already died would have been the highest casualty rate of any Arctic expedition.

Bernier believes the astonishing preservation of the objects recovered from Erebus in the last three years, and the condition of Terror, mean that paper records including log books, journals and sickness records may yet be recovered, finally resolving the riddle.

The exhibition vindicates another victim of the tragedy, John Rae, an Orkney-born surgeon who worked for the Hudson Bay company. Rae, who spoke several Inuit languages and had learned how to build an igloo for shelter, led one one of the rescue missions, often travelling alone wearing snow shoes of his own design. The Inuit transmission of oral history is so perfect that one 20th-century anthropologist seeking Franklin stories realised they were telling of encounters with Sir Martin Frobisher 300 years earlier – the foolish hairy tall people whose hats were absurdly not joined to their parkas were perfectly recalled.

When Rae brought back objects bought from the Inuit, including personal possessions such as a medal of Franklin’s, he also reported their stories of poorly dressed hungry men stumbling in the snow and carrying pieces of human meat as supplies. He was right, but his own reputation was destroyed, and he was refused a knighthood. Charles Dickens wrote in Household Words: “No man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that the sad remnants of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Inuit themselves.”