Unravelling the Franklin Mystery

After more than 150 years of search efforts, Prime Minister Harper announced today that a lost ship from the mysterious Franklin expedition has been discovered. Using Parks Canada’s newly acquired underwater vehicle, the searchers picked up sonar images of a shipwreck which they believe to be either HMS Erebus or HMS Terror.

The two ships of the Franklin expedition disappeared in 1846 after becoming locked in ice. (Source: CBC News)

In today’s announcement, Harper said: “For more than a century this has been a great Canadian story… It’s been the subject of scientists and historians and writers and singers. And so I think we have a really important day in mapping together the history of our country.”

For the full story, click here.

An important book on the subject of the doomed expedition is David C. Woodman’s Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony (part of MQUP’s Native and Northern Series).

Woodman’s book is a reconstruction of the the mysterious events surrounding the expedition that, when published in 1991, challenged standard interpretations of the time. Among the many who have tried to discover the truth behind the Franklin disaster, Woodman was the first historian to recognize the profound importance of Inuit testimony and to analyse it in depth.

In his book, Woodman concludes that the Inuit probably did visit Franklin’s ships while the crew was still on board and that there were some Inuit who actually saw the sinking of one of the ships.

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In 1992, Woodman was involved in a search for the shipwrecks using instruments called “magnetometers” to detect the presence and strength of magnetic fields. You can read more about that and the entire history of search efforts on CBC’s neat interactive timeline of the Franklin searches: 1848-2011 (only updated to 2011 for now).

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