Jim Balsillie had fallen in love with the Arctic. Deeply, deeply in love. And he was looking to do something about it.

It was September 2010, and the BlackBerry co-founder had spent three straight summers exploring the north with his friend Marty Bergmann, an Arctic researcher and advocate.

Through Bergmann, Balsillie had learned about Parks Canada’s renewed search for the sunken Franklin expedition, lost since the ill-fated voyage of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in the 1840s. It was a mystery that had begun to nag at Balsillie in the same way it had nagged at generations of explorers before him.

Hopes had been high when archeologists embarked on the new search in 2008, but resources were limited. That first year, the Parks Canada researchers basically had to hitchhike with the Canadian Coast Guard. They needed their own ship, but the political will for such an expense did not exist.

Balsillie, then 49, shared Bergmann’s concern that private foreign interests would beat Canada to the Franklin discovery. He wanted to speed things up.

Balsillie was told the guy he had to see was Andrew Campbell, a 45-year-old vice president at Parks Canada.

A meeting — “the fateful meeting” — was arranged for noon on Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2010. Balsillie and Tim MacDonald, another philanthropist businessman with an interest in the Arctic, rendezvoused with Campbell and several of his colleagues at 99 Bank St. in Ottawa. Over lunch at the Rideau Club on the building’s 15th floor the businessmen and the public servants hatched a plan that would change Canadian history.

Balsillie put it straight that day. “What do you need?” he asked.

Campbell was clear. “We need a dedicated vessel,” he said.

“OK,” Balsillie replied. So he bought a ship.

The mission

And so began a very Canadian story about a co-operative history-making quest embarked upon by a parade of partners: Parks Canada, a millionaire philanthropist, a small geographical society unaccustomed to the limelight, the Canadian navy and a troupe of other government agencies and private contributors.

It would lead to the largest search mission ever assembled to find the Franklin expedition, with more resources, better technology and a whole lot more money than ever before. Naturally, it would also be more complicated, and the financial and political investment would generate more pressure to make the find.

As the Star’s Paul Watson wrote from the Arctic this week, the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition “depended on what some might consider a crap shoot: several federal agencies working together, sharing information, compromising, and leaving egos ashore.”

And yet there was more confidence in the mission this time around, a collective sense that something would happen — that something had tohappen.

This was Canada’s moon shot.

A ship named Marty

A few months after the meeting in Ottawa, Balsillie and MacDonald founded the Arctic Research Foundation, a privately funded non-profit organization that would partner with Parks Canada in its northern mission. Balsillie didn’t want to talk about money this week, but agreed that his investment has probably been about seven figures a year.

The promised dedicated vessel was a 19-metre fishing trawler from Newfoundland, which Balsillie’s foundation retrofitted to make suitable for northern waters. The ship was sweeping the Northwest Passage by the summer of 2011. Its arrival coincided with a tragedy. On Aug. 20 that year, Marty Bergmann, the man who had introduced Balsillie to the Arctic, died with several others in a plane crash in Resolute Bay, Nunavut.

Not long after, the Newfoundland fishing trawler that would come to play an integral role in the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition got a new name. It was rechristened the R/V Martin Bergmann.

Night at the museum

Rear Adm. John Newton met Jim Balsillie on a serendipitous night at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

It was the spring of 2013. The event was a gala dinner honouring Battle of the Atlantic veterans, held in the LeBreton Gallery, a large, concrete storage room full of nineteenth-century artillery pieces, tanks and a Voodoo fighter jet.

“We were seated next to each other,” the Admiral recalls, “because somebody had the foresight to say, ‘Here’s two Arctic nuts, we’ll put ‘em in a corner together.’”

The Admiral, whose Twitter handle is @GreatBigSeas, says he could see that Balsillie, like him, had “an Arctic flame burning in his soul.” Newton’s Arctic soul had been on fire since his first voyage north as a teenager in 1973, when his father, a navy chief, had sent him on a naval mission as a cadet.

In the weeks before the two Arctic nuts met at the war museum, Balsillie, an honourary navy captain, had been gearing up to return to the Arctic for his third search expedition, and he needed a crew to man the Martin Bergmann.

The Admiral, then a 54-year-old commodore and director general of navy personnel, had an interest in preparing his recruits to crew the Arctic offshore patrol ships, which are set to be constructed in 2015. Manning the Martin Bergmann would be a great way to build the navy’s operational capabilities in the north, the Admiral thought.

A partnership was formed.

That’s how the Royal Canadian Navy came to be involved in the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition. Admiral Newton would arrange for navy staff to crew the Martin Bergmann in 2013. The following year, the navy’s HMCSKingston, a 55-metre maritime patrol ship equipped with high-resolution sonar, would join the Franklin mission.

Up north with the PM

In the summer of 2013, John Geiger, a Franklin historian and CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, was invited to tour the Arctic with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The geographical society is a small non-profit dedicated to “promoting a deeper appreciation of Canada.” Founded in 1929, it organizes lectures, honours great explorers and publishes the magazine Canadian Geographic. The Franklin mission was a big deal for them.

During the six-day trip, Geiger, who co-authored Frozen In Time: The Fate of The Franklin Expedition, had several conversations with Harper about the Franklin search. He told the prime minister he believed the society could help tell the Franklin story and bring in more private partners willing to help.

“The government can’t afford to spend huge sums of money — why not?” Geiger said. “We should throw as much at this problem as we can.”

Later that year, the historian was invited to the Throne Speech and given a hint that something was coming.

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“The story of the North is the story of Canada,” the prime minister said in the October 2013 address. “In order to tell that story for Canada’s 150th year, our Government will continue efforts to solve one of the most enduring mysteries of our past. We will work with renewed determination and an expanded team of partners to discover the fate of Sir John Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition.”

This was huge.

Geiger and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society joined forces with Parks Canada in November. A few months later, in early 2014, Geiger was introduced to Balsillie, whohad read his book and was happy to team up with the official teller of Franklin’s story. Geiger had the knowledge and enthusiasm to convince private sector partners that this was a mission worth joining. Before long, he had commitments from the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, One Ocean Expeditions and Shell Canada.

“I went to them, cap in hand, and said look, we could do something great for Canada, but we need your help,” Geiger recalls. Here was a chance, he said in his pitch, to educate Canadians about the Arctic — its people, its future, its economy, climate change.

“We have a once in a lifetime opportunity,” he said. “We have a chance to find one of the Franklin ships and if we do, we’re going to have the attention of the country and probably many people around the world.” The discovery of one of the sunken ships, he told them, “would rank up there with King Tut’s tomb.”

The red tape

It wasn’t all smiles and earnest pitches and high fives. With at least 13 organizations committed in various ways to the 2014 mission, there was much bureaucratic sludge to wade through.

The mission’s red tape cutter was Andrew Campbell, the Parks Canada vice president who told Balsillie back in 2010 that they needed a dedicated vessel. He was in charge of permits, protocols, logistics, security clearances, legal agreements, memorandums of understanding, shipment plans, and on and on and on.

“I told a lot of bad jokes to get people to calm down,” Campbell says.

Sometimes, when progress stalled, Balsillie would have to make a call.

“I’ve maintained a good working relationship with the Prime Minister’s office,” he says. “So if there was trouble I would call them. And I’m not one to carry the Prime Minister’s bags or pump his tires — I think of myself as rather non-partisan on these matters — but it wouldn’t have happened without his leadership.”

By the summer of 2014, everything had somehow come together.

The Martin Bergmann and the HMCS Kingston would sail with the Canadian Coast Guard’s Sir Wilfrid Laurier, an 83-metre icebreaker that functioned as a command centre, and the One Ocean Voyager, a 117-metre private cruise ship that carried additional equipment and housed scientists and sponsors.

The Canadian Hydrographic Service, which charts marine navigation routes, would provide two launches, Gannett and Kinglet, equipped with multi-beam sonar technology.

Over in Halifax, Admiral Newton, now commander of Maritime Forces Atlantic, had convinced Defence Research and Development Canada to send the Arctic Explorer, a fancy new autonomous underwater vehicle with high-resolution synthetic aperture sonar made in Newfoundland and an acoustic homing system manufactured in Nova Scotia. The Arctic Explorer looked like a yellow torpedo and had the ability to spot a pop can on the ocean floor.

But it would be the Investigator — a small research boat owned by Parks Canada that drags a sonar system behind it — that would ultimately find the Franklin ship in early September. It would be fitting, since the vessel took its name from the very first rescue ship that set out in the late 1840s to find the Franklin expedition and sunk trying.

Under pressure

Geiger the historian recalls a moment of doubt. Well, several moments, really, but one in particular.

In Pond Inlet, Nunavut, on a stop during his annual northern tour last month, the prime minister offered a toast to Franklin’s memory and said he believed the discovery was going to happen this year.

“I have to tell you, I was a little nervous,” Geiger says. “I felt like I didn’t want to let him down. I didn’t want to let the country down. We put so much effort, time, organization into this. And to hear that level of confidence I was at once heartened by it, but I was also a little unnerved.”

Less than two weeks later, the discovery was made. The orchestrators — Balsillie, Campbell, Geiger, Admiral Newton and many others — were all there to celebrate the success of the mission with the researchers who found the ship and the others who made it possible.

There was much raving, in the excited aftermath, about co-operation and dedication and partnerships and shared passion. There were many it-never-would-have-happened-without-so-and-sos.

Yes, it was all very Canadian.

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