ABOARD CCGS SIR WILFRID LAURIER—The historic breakthrough in the long search for Sir John Franklin’s Arctic shipwrecks opens up new risks.

The search effort, which archeologists hope will continue until they find the second long-missing ship, is creating modern navigation charts that make it easier for large vessels to ply Canada’s Arctic waterways.

Several of those deliver hundreds of tourists to Canada’s High Arctic each year. Many rush ashore in small boats to visit sensitive sites that archeologists are trying to protect from trampling feet, souvenir hunters and shameless looters hungry for profit.

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Global headlines about the discovery of a Franklin ship — either HMS Erebus or HMS Terror — in shallow waters off a remote Nunavut island are expected to draw many more.

Roughly half a dozen cruise ships steamed into the Northwest Passage this year, along a route near known Franklin expedition archeological sites, said Douglas Stenton, an archeologist serving as Nunavut’s director of heritage.

Tourism is important to Nunavut, but so is its cultural heritage. The territory requires cruise ship operators to get permits to bring passengers ashore at heritage sites.

The ships launch smaller boats that ferry hundreds into the most popular spots, such as Beechey Island, a national historic site where Franklin and his 128 men spent their first horrific winter in 1845-46. Three of the men were buried there in shallow graves.

Like most of the Arctic archipelago, the spot where Franklin and his men overwintered is a barren place: no designated paths or visitor information signs, simply plaques honouring the dead.

Tourist traffic varies with sea ice, which is heavy in the area this season.

“One year, maybe four or five years ago, there may have been as many as 500 people who visited Beechey Island on several ships,” Stenton said.

“Someone mentioned to me recently there’s a very large ship planning to come in 2016 that holds hundreds of passengers. If you look on the web, you’ll see Northwest Passage cruises are booked several years in advance.”

Beechey Island is one of several Arctic locales where anyone who knows how look has a good chance of finding a priceless Franklin artifact lying on or very close to the windswept and grassless surface.

Nunavut sets conditions for visits. But the Canadian Arctic is not like the Acropolis in Athens, where a tourist bending over to pick up a shard of marble will get blasted by a guard’s whistle.

The best hope of stopping tourists from pilfering a Franklin site are cruise ship staff or the archeologists and historians that Nunavut encourages the cruise ships to bring along.

The Inuit Heritage Trust, set up under the Nunavut land claims agreement, requires the cruise ships to carry an Inuit cultural specialist on board, who can also keep an eye out for tourists breaking the rules.

After this month’s discoveries of the submerged Franklin wreck and pieces of the ship on shore, “I can well imagine that there’ll be some renewed interest on the part of Inuit to be more directly involved in the protection of these sites,” Stenton said. “In particular, the community of Gjoa Haven could get much greater involvement in having cultural specialists on board some of the cruises.”

Stenton, who insists Nunavut’s current controls on cruise ship tourists “have worked out, I would say, pretty well,” is more worried about private vessels, including sailing yachts that come and go without permits.

“We don’t want to see any damage at these sites at Beechey,” he said. “We don’t want to see people leaving things behind, which has happened.”

Nunavut also warns cruise ship visitors not to disturb things that might seem trivial to the untrained eye.

“So if there’s a pile of crushed-up tin cans, or barrel hoops or something, those are an integral part of the site,” Stenton said. “And they’re not souvenirs.”

As the Arctic warms — and news spreads of the shipwreck discovery — cruise ships are booking up fast. And they’re applying to visit more pristine Franklin sites, including Victory Point, where expedition members landed in 1848 after abandoning their ice-trapped ships the previous September.

“All well,” a note written in ink and sealed in a metal tube declared on May 28, 1847 during a survey trip. A second note, scribbled around the margins on April 25, 1848, recorded Franklin’s death on June 11, 1847.

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The survivors now numbered “105 souls,” the Victory Point note said.

On Sunday, Coast Guard icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier, mother ship in the hunt for the Franklin wrecks, spent another day anchored in eastern Queen Maude Gulf, rocking and rolling in winds that hit 35 knots.

The forecast is more promising, with winds expected to diminish Monday. Eight Parks Canada underwater archeologists are ready to dive down to the newly discovered wreck as soon as the get the green light.

One question they hope to answer is whether the vessel, sitting upright on the seabed about 11 meters down, is Erebus or Terror. Erebus, slightly larger than Terror, was Franklin’s flagship. He lived and worked in the captain’s quarters at the stern.

The possibility of an even more historic discovery inside the shipwreck is so sensitive that Parks Canada archeologists have warned they won’t immediately make public what they see in their first dive.

Before searchers based on the Laurier could start the current hunt for the sunken wrecks in 2008, the seabed had to be surveyed to find safe access routes through uncharted waters.

Shoals and other shipping hazards are found, often far from shore, in areas where the Franklin wrecks were thought to be.

Using sonar, Canadian Hydrographic Service teams in small launches created more detailed charts, which allowed the icebreaker to get closer — and the searchers closer still.

Ottawa declared the wrecks national historic sites in 1992, long before anyone knew precisely where they were beneath the High Arctic seas. But that didn’t provide any legal protection.

A 1997 diplomatic agreement between Canada and Britain gave Canada control over investigation, excavation and recovery of artifacts. Britain retained ownership of the ships, but Canada will own any artifacts retrieved.

A separate agreement between Ottawa and Nunavut, signed in 2012, ensures the territory’s government has a say in whether relics, or even human remains, are raised from the seabed, and what happens to any that are.

Stenton is also seeing permit applications from cruise ships for visits to Erebus Bay, where he recently found numerous Franklin artifacts.

Several are objects that make an instant, intimate connection with the men who touched them in their dying days more than 160 years ago.

There’s a button made of mottled white and brown bone. Stenton has no doubt it came off a garment worn by someone on the Franklin expedition. Just slightly larger is a round piece of iron with tiny dimples. It was part of a sailmaker’s palm, made of stiff rawhide, which a seaman wore around his wrist while repairing sails. It was used instead of a thimble to push a large needle through heavy sailcloth.

Seeing it now in Stenton’s lab aboard the Laurier, it’s easy to imagine a man with fingers numbed by the Arctic cold, maybe even burning with frostbite, trying to fashion a piece of sail into a wind-block. Or maybe a shroud for a dead shipmate.

Last year Stenton removed around 80 bones, belonging to the skeletons of three Franklin crewmen, from the spot where a searcher buried them in 1879.

A team of experts, including Stenton, spent months studying the remains and plan to report on their findings next spring. The archeologist reburied them, beneath a new stone cairn, on Sept. 6.

“It was done in a very respectful manner and done very carefully,” he said. “I privately said a few words. Not out loud. Just to myself.”

And he’s keeping them private.

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