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The Breadalbane was a wooden vessel with three masts that was involved in the hunt for Captain John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition when it got trapped by the Arctic ice and sunk off Beechey Island in the Northwest Passage in 1853.

The images of the wreck captured in 1983 were stunning. They appeared on the cover of the National Geographic. A documentary got made. There was a buzz.

Then, the cameras and the explorer and our government moved on until this month.

A seven-person expedition, involving the Canadian navy, a Canadian archeologist and an American expert in remote, camera-equipped underwater vehicles, returned to film the Breadalbane for the first time in 31 years, using all the latest technology and high-definition camera wizardry.

This included a portable generator-sized gadget, aptly named a remote operated vehicle (ROV for short), manufactured by California-based SeaBotix, which went whirring beneath the ice, shooting footage of the Breadalbane.

“It is a ‘wow,’ there is no question about it, it is a definite ‘wow,’ ” Dr. MacInnis says from Florida after watching a video clip of the new images from the old wreck. “You see a detail, a crispness, that we just didn’t have in 1983. You can see the hull’s copper sheeting, in clear detail.

“These new images are twice as good, maybe more, than what we shot.”

As far as shipwrecks go, the Breadalbane was a masterpiece just waiting for a fresh photo shoot. Its attachment to the Franklin story — Franklin and the other Arctic explorers were the astronauts of their day — give it historical cachet, while its location gives it the distinction of being the most northern shipwreck there is.