The Two Royal Navy Ships That Sailed Into the Canadian Arctic in 1845 to Find the Northwest Passage and Vanished With 129 Men

Sir John Franklin (1786–1847) was 59 years old, a former lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), and a veteran of three previous Arctic exploration campaigns (1819–1822, 1825–1827, 1845) when the Admiralty appointed him in early 1845 to command the most heavily-funded and best-equipped Northwest Passage expedition in British naval history.

The expedition’s two ships — HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — were former bomb vessels rebuilt for polar service. They had steam-powered auxiliary screws capable of approximately four knots under steam alone, iron-reinforced bow plating, internal hot-water heating systems running through every cabin, three years of provisions for 129 men, libraries of approximately 1,200 books, daguerreotype cameras, and the most complete set of scientific instruments ever sent to the Arctic.

They departed Greenhithe on the Thames on 19 May 1845 with 24 officers and 105 men. They were last seen by European witnesses on 26 July 1845 — by the whaling ships Enterprise and Prince of Wales — moored to an iceberg in Baffin Bay, waiting for the late-summer ice break-up. They sailed into Lancaster Sound the following week.

The Erebus and Terror did not return.

What we know now

The reconstruction of the expedition’s fate has taken from approximately 1850 to the present and has drawn on three categories of evidence: Inuit oral history (collected most systematically by John Rae in 1854 and by Charles Francis Hall in the 1860s, and revisited in the 1990s and 2000s); the Victory Point note (a single ship’s document recovered by a Royal Navy search party from a stone cairn on King William Island in 1859); and the physical remains (skeletal, equipment, and ship-structural material) gradually located on King William Island and the surrounding sea floor between 1854 and 2024.

The expedition wintered on Beechey Island in 1845–1846. Three sailors died there during the first winter and were buried in the permafrost. Their bodies have been exhumed (Beattie 1984, 1986) and chemically analysed: bone-lead concentrations in all three were approximately ten times the contemporary North American baseline, indicating heavy ingestion of lead during the months immediately preceding their deaths. The most plausible source is the lead-tin solder used on the expedition’s food-tin seams — a poorly-controlled manufacturing process by the supplier Stephen Goldner that left lead exposed to the food contents.

The expedition then sailed south in summer 1846, was beset in ice in Victoria Strait off the northwest coast of King William Island in September 1846, and did not break free. They wintered on the ice in 1846–1847 and 1847–1848.

Franklin died on 11 June 1847 — cause of death unrecorded but probably scurvy or pneumonia. He was 61. Command passed to Francis Crozier of the Terror.

Victory Point, 25 April 1848

On 25 April 1848 the remaining 105 surviving officers and men abandoned the Erebus and Terror, walked the eight miles of ice west to the northwest coast of King William Island, and left a cairn note at Victory Point signed by Crozier and the Erebus’s commander James Fitzjames. The note explained that 24 men had already died (including Franklin), that the survivors were marching south toward the Back River, and that they hoped to reach the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake — approximately 1,800 km south, an essentially impossible journey on foot in late spring through an unmapped subarctic landscape with rapidly diminishing food.

The Victory Point note was the last European document the expedition produced. It was recovered in May 1859 by the Royal Navy search party under Francis Leopold McClintock — eleven years after it was deposited.

What happened to the survivors

Inuit oral history collected in 1854 by the Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor John Rae described a party of approximately 40 European men marching south along the King William Island coast in summer 1848, increasingly emaciated and showing physical signs that the Inuit informants identified as having begun to eat their own dead. Rae’s report — published in the British press in October 1854 — included specific Inuit testimony of cut marks on European bones consistent with butchering.

The cannibalism report produced furious denials from the British public, the Admiralty, and from Franklin’s widow Lady Jane Franklin in particular. Charles Dickens published two long Household Words articles in December 1854 attacking Rae and arguing that the Inuit testimony was unreliable.

Cut-mark analysis of expedition bones recovered from King William Island sites in the 1980s and 1990s has confirmed Rae’s report. Multiple skeletons show specific patterns of cut marks at joints and skull bases consistent with disarticulation for consumption. The Inuit testimony was correct.

Approximately 30 men appear to have made it as far south as the Adelaide Peninsula on the Canadian mainland coast before dying. The rest died on King William Island. None survived. The expedition’s reach in summer 1848 was approximately 200 km south of the Victory Point cairn.

The wrecks

The Erebus was located in September 2014 by the Parks Canada Underwater Archaeology Team in Wilmot and Crampton Bay off the southwest coast of King William Island, at a depth of 11 metres. The Terror was located in September 2016 by the Arctic Research Foundation in Terror Bay on the south coast of King William Island, at 24 metres. Both wrecks are remarkably preserved by the cold low-salinity water and by the dark winter half of the year — wooden cabin furniture, ceramic plates with the ships’ painted names, and at least one navigational chart survive intact on the seafloor.

The 21st-century archaeological investigation of the wrecks continues. The expedition has produced no surviving documents that explain the strategic decisions Crozier and Fitzjames made in 1847–1848 that turned a difficult but recoverable situation into a 129-man disaster.

The Inuit oral history collected in 1854 and the 21st-century wreck excavations have, between them, produced the modern reconstruction. The European reluctance to believe the Inuit informants in 1854 delayed the modern reconstruction by approximately 160 years.