OTTAWA — To solve a 168-year-old Arctic mystery, the Canadian government had spared no expense. Officials over the last several years used satellite and underwater imaging and deployed crews from the navy and coast guard along with scientists and researchers to search for the Terror, a British ship that vanished along with 129 crew members while trying to map the Northwest Passage.

But in the end it was a tip from a local Inuit hunter that led to the apparent discovery of the Terror. The discovery, made on Sept. 3, comes two years after the Erebus, the other ship in the disastrous expedition led by the British explorer Sir John Franklin, was found.

The location of the Terror, appropriately in the middle of the coincidentally named Terror Bay, matched longstanding Inuit oral accounts of Franklin’s fate rather than the assumptions of modern researchers.

“The Inuits’ oral traditional knowledge around Franklin has been the only authoritative account,” said John Geiger, the chief executive of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. “Right from the early days, the Inuit had provided extraordinary insight, and it continues to this day.”