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Franklin's final resting place not found
last update: Sep 01, 2010 02:45 PM
From a "Wall Street Journal" article: The location of the final resting place of British naval hero Sir John Franklin will continue to be a mystery as Canadian scientists' announced they were not able to find it.
The failure to find his final resting place deepens of the most enduring mysteries of the Arctic.
John Franklin set sail from England with 134 men aboard two ships, the Terror and Erebus in May 1845, to search for the fabled Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Ocean, and most of them were never heard from again.
A six-man Canadian government survey team, supported by the Canadian Coast Guard vessel the Sir Wilfrid Laurier and its near 50-man crew, last week surveyed hundreds of square miles of frigid sea floor hoping to succeed where some 100 other expeditions failed, discovering the fate of the ships and a crew whose demise has been attributed to factors from lead poisoning to cannibalism.
When Franklin and his crew disappeared, some 36 expeditions, financed mostly through Franklin's wife and the British Navy, sought the lost crew but to no avail. The bodies of some sailors, some in formal graves that identified the crew members by name and some sailors' possessions and other relics were discovered. When in 1859, a Royal Navy search party found a message under a cairn on King William Island that detailed how the crew had abandoned their ships after being trapped in ice for a year and that Franklin had died in 1847 and the remaining crew would head to Back's River, hundreds of miles to the south, the British gave up the search. But not the Canadians, as in the 1960s, it has sent its army to look and amateurs have put fortunes and lives on the line after catching what they call the "Franklin bug."
The mystery remains.
Read more:
Wall Street Journal, 31st August 2010
