"The White North Has Thy Bones": Sir John Franklin's 1845 Expedition and the Loss of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror

Summary

The hunt for Sir John Franklin's lost ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror is arguably the longest shipwreck search in history. As a story the 1845 Franklin expedition seemingly has it all: two state-of-the-art ships and experienced Royal Navy men vanishing barely without a trace, a life and death struggle for survival in an unforgiving environment, cannibalism, dogged contemporary searches, and fascinating stories from indigenous Inuit who both witnessed the expedition's demise and went aboard and salvaged the deserted HMS Erebus just before it sank. This introductory paper will: outline the historical background of the expedition including both European and Inuit evidence streams; summarize events painstakingly reconstructed over the course of almost 170 years; introduce contemporary wreck location clues and relic finds; and set the stage for the symposium's description of twentienth and twenty-first century marine and terrestrial archaeological fieldwork that led to the discovery of HMS Erebus.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Wreck of HMS Erebus from Sir John Franklin’s 1845 Arctic Expedition   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 621