Franklin's lost expedition

The 1845 Franklin Expedition went looking for the Northwest Passage through Canada's Arctic, and CBC News says close to 130 sailors died. Inuit accounts, recorded by John Rae in 1854 and later by Charles Francis Hall, describe what became of some of the men.

CBC News describes the 1845 Franklin Expedition as an attempt on the Northwest Passage through Canada's Arctic in which close to 130 sailors died. A note dated 25 April 1848, transcribed by Francis Leopold McClintock in his 1859 book The Voyage of the 'Fox', says HM ships Terror and Erebus had been held fast in the ice since 12 September 1846 and were abandoned on 22 April 1848. It records that Sir John Franklin had died on 11 June 1847, and that 105 officers and men went ashore under Captain F. R. M. Crozier.

Later accounts came from Inuit. Parks Canada says that in 1854 the explorer John Rae was told by Inuit of starving white men, whom they called Qallunaat, seen four years earlier, and that those reports included cannibalism. Inuit gave Rae proof, including a silver plate, cutlery, some of it marked with officers' initials, and the Royal Hanoverian medal Franklin had been given when he was knighted. Charles Francis Hall's Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition (1879) records further Inuit testimony. The mother of a man who had seen Crozier, whom Inuit called Ag-loo-ka, told Hall that people of Ook-goo-lik island had found two boats on sledges with dead white men inside.

The Guardian reported in 2016 on a ship found in the Arctic 168 years after the voyage. In that report, a man named Kogvik chose to keep one encounter to himself because a camera had gone missing, which he feared was a sign of bad spirits. The Guardian adds that Inuit have long believed, over generations, that such spirits began to roam King William Island once Franklin and his men had died. In 2021 CBC News reported that a DNA match had put a name to the bones of one HMS Erebus sailor, engineer John Gregory, matched to a descendant in South Africa, 176 years after the expedition set out.