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Search for historic Franklin expedition to continue this summer ?
last update: Jun 21, 2011 08:41 PM
From a "Montreal Gazette" article: A Parks Canada's spokeswoman said officials are working with several partners in the federal and Nunavut governments “towards obtaining various authorizations and securing the necessary logistical support to be able to have the most productive search possible.”
It would be the third season of searching for Sir John Franklin's lost ships, the 19th-century British explorer whose ill-fated expedition to the Canadian Arctic in the 1840s ended with the sinking of the ice-trapped HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, as well as the deaths of Franklin and all 128 men under his command.
The Parks Canada spokeswoman Natalie Fay told Postmedia News that plans are “fluid” and that the agency isn’t yet ready to disclose details of the proposed mission. She said that the two previous searches in 2008 and 2010 were successful “in charting a navigation corridor to an area where we believe, through historic research, there is a high probability of finding the lost ships. The area of surveying was approximately 150 square kilometres.”
The final resting place of the Franklin wrecks, which are believed to lie somewhere in the ice-choked waters off Nunavut’s King William Island, has eluded recent generations of searchers determined to locate one of the great global prizes of underwater archeology. Last year, the landmark discovery of the most famous of the Franklin rescue ships, HMS Investigator, which was abandoned in the Western Arctic pack ice in 1853, has buoyed hopes for an even greater find this summer.
“With the arguable exception of the vessels from the Franklin expedition, the Investigator is the most significant shipwreck in the Canadian Arctic,” Jim Prentice, the former minister for Parks Canada, said after discovery last year.
Though the Franklin ships vanished more than 160 years ago, the expedition’s many enduring mysteries have continued to attract attention from archeologists, wreck hunters, historians, songwriters and authors of popular books.
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