On September 1, Canadian Coast Guard helicopter pilot Andrew Stirling set down on a remote island off the mainland Arctic coast of Canada. He was ferrying two archaeologists for the Government of Nunavut, whose work was focused on land sites associated with the lost 1845-48 British Arctic Expedition commanded by Sir John Franklin. Douglas Stenton, the lead archaeologist and director of heritage for Nunavut and Robert Park, had been documenting expedition sites for several years, their work complimenting the sea-based search by Parks Canada for HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Stenton was interested in a stone feature he had sighted from the air, and wanted a closer look.
Beechey Island where Erebus and Terror spent the winter of 1845 – 1846.
It was Stirling, however, who spotted a rusted piece of iron leaning against a rock near a long abandoned Inuit camp site. “Finding the object, it’s hard to put into words. At the time of seeing it and calling Bob (Park) over to let him know what I had found behind a rock, and his first words were “This is a good find” and then Doug (Stenton) came over, to do his investigation and he spotted the two (Royal Navy) broad arrows, it was a very exciting and a very proud moment,” said Stirling. The rusted davit, part of a lifting apparatus from the deck of a ship, might have meant relatively little – another bit or expedition related ephemera, carried off the lost ships – but it proved instead to be a vital lead in a 168-year old search for clues to the fate of Franklin.
Andrew Stirling holding the davit at the site it was found.
Nine days earlier, on August 23, a Canadian warship, HMCS Kingston, sat at anchor off the coastal hamlet of Pond Inlet, on Baffin Island’s north coast. There, leaders of the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition were invited to a reception with the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. There was excited talk about the prospects for the expedition, the largest search for Franklin since the early 1850s, with four ships, assorted support craft and leading edge Canadian technology, most notably the “Arctic Explorer” Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, with its synthetic aperture sonar, operated by Defence Research Development Canada, an arm of the country’s military.
On the bridge of the Kingston there was a moment of prayer, two Arctic maps were signed, and then glasses were raised, as John Geiger, Chief Executive Officer of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, proposed a toast to the success of the search. Prime Minister Harper raised his glass. “To a find,” he said. Others did too, among them Jim Balsillie, a high tech legend for his role as co-founder of BlackBerry, Geordie Dalglish, representing his family’s W. Garfield Weston Foundation, Rear Admiral John Newton of the Royal Canadian Navy, and Ryan Harris, an underwater archaeologist with Parks Canada who has been spearheading the agency’s search, now in its sixth field season.
Harper himself has a great affinity for Canada’s Arctic, and has developed a deep, almost scholarly, interest in the history of exploration of the region, particularly in Franklin. It was the Prime Minister who assembled the broad partnership of government agencies and private foundations and businesses, and he made his confidence and expectation for success clear to those assembled. “We’re going to find Franklin, this summer,” he said adamantly. A short time later, the Kingston would weigh anchor, and the expedition would begin in earnest.
3 graves on right are of Franklin’s crew on Beechey Island 1845 – 1846
were Franklin spent his first winter.
“The goal of the 2014 expedition was to marry the greatest possible capability and the very best available technology, and bring them into two possible areas in which the missing ships could be located,” said Geiger, author of Frozen In Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition. “But none of us expected what we were up against.”
The major target of the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition was the so-called “northern search zone”, an area of 1,400 square kilometres in Victoria Strait where Erebus and Terror had been beset in multi-year sea ice in 1846, before they were finally abandoned in 1848, the crews already sick and dying, according to a message scrawled on an Admiralty form and left in a cairn by Franklin’s officers. A forecast by the Canadian Ice Service noted that, while sea ice in Victoria Strait was thicker than the previous year, the strait was still expected to be clear of ice by the time the search fleet arrived in late August.
Instead of open water, however, Victoria Strait was clogged with thick ice, the worst summer ice coverage in nearly a decade. Only two of the flotilla’s seven vessels, the Canadian Coast Guard Ship (CCGS) Sir Wilfrid Laurier, an ice breaker, and the ice-capable One Ocean Voyager, would be able to navigate through it. This unexpected situation threatened to defeat the hopes for the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition, just as ice had broken Franklin 168 years earlier.
CCGS Pierre Radisson cutting a path in Victoria Strait for Zelada Desganes and Voyager
The result was that the Kingston, without any ice rating, would never reach the search area. Instead, Voyager, already transporting Parks Canada’s boat R/V Investigator, had to backtrack to retrieve the equipment that would prove critical to the ability of Parks Canada to verify Erebus. Another search vessel, the Martin Bergmann, was forced to stay in the south search zone, close to the mainland coast, where exhaustive surveys by Parks Canada in earlier years had failed to yield anything of interest, and yet which remained a target area because of Inuit accounts to early searchers that indicated a ship had sunk in the area. Even the Sir Wilfrid Laurier was forced south, because the small survey launches that operated off of it could not survey in the thick ice. Only the Voyager was left, and it struggled to deploy the AUV because of the ice, only ever covering a fraction of its assigned area. The expedition all looked like it was poised to end in failure.
Continues in Part 2.
Photo Credits
Beechey Island – By Joseph Frey – All Rights Reserved
Andrew Stirling holding the davit – By Dr. Douglas Stenton – All Rights Reserved
3 graves of Franklin’s crew – By Joseph Frey – All Rights Reserved
CCGS Pierre Radisson – By Joseph Frey – All Rights Reserved
[…] Continued from Part 1 […]