Churning swells make it impossible to see the Erebus, but the long-sought polar prize hauntingly lies adorned with kelp and sea anemones just 36 feet beneath my waterproof boots. Our Zodiac next motors to the cramped dive barge at ground zero. “Most tantalizing” is Crozier’s desk, a thick sediment protecting tightly shut drawers that may contain charts and documents to unravel the nautical nightmare. A robotic camera filmed 20 cabins, doors open, toilet chamber pots still next to beds. “You never see that on shipwrecks anywhere. Harris explains how the submerged Terror is upright, the glass windows and wheel intact, with muskets hanging on walls, and dishes and bottles tidily sitting on shelves, all as if the vessel gently sank. Marine archeologist Ryan Harris points to screens showing sonar images of the well-preserved Erebus and Terror, the latter about 50 miles away and an astonishing time-capsule. Then they vaporized.Īfter our 20-minute Zodiac ride, we clamber up onto the Parks Canada research ship, RV David Thompson, which is home for eight divers who have as little as two days each year to comb the Franklin wrecks due to icy, perilous Mother Nature. One message, from May 1847, said the crews had wintered at Beechey Island, that Franklin was in command and “all well.” Eleven months later, Terror captain Francis Crozier ominously scribbled on the edges that Franklin and 23 others had died and that the remaining 105 men had just abandoned the ice-locked ships after 19 months, and set off on foot. In 1859, a hand-scrawled note was discovered rolled in a tin cylinder on King William Island near where the Erebus and Terror had been stuck in pack ice. The Inuit, we learn, play a crucial role in the shipwreck saga.īy the time we layer up for our Erebus visit, I’ve been glued to onboard lectures and videos about the two doomed British Royal Navy vessels that carried vast provisions for its crew including 64,000 pounds of salted pork and beef, 9,400 pounds of chocolate, 3,600 gallons of high-proof booze and 200 gallons of “wine for the sick.” Officials from Parks Canada - our informative shipmates for three days - put on a fascinating show-and-tell with replicas of earlier found artifacts, including the only written record from the disaster. Inuit culturalists teach us about their subsistence lifestyle (be forewarned, those fuzzy polar bears are dinner and pants for them), and we drop in on tiny Inuit hamlets in this harsh extreme north. On Zodiac rides, we’re deliriously dwarfed by opaque-blue skyscraper icebergs, some resembling frosted witches’ castles and humongous molar teeth. One morning, from our ship’s deck, we watch a magnificent polar bear feasting on its fresh-killed seal atop a blood-stained ice floe. The trailblazing experience is part of remarkable Arctic journey I share with 170 fellow passengers traveling 3,325 miles aboard the Ocean Endeavour through the isolated indigenous Inuit territory of Nunavut in Canada to rugged, barely populated Greenland. In September, by Zodiacs in small groups one at a time, we’re the world’s first-ever tourists to make it. Adventure Canada planned to take guests here on five previous cruises over three years but impassable ice and mighty winds scrapped any attempts while at sea. How did I become an eyewitness to epic polar history? By booking a 17-day Northwest Passage expedition cruise with tour operator Adventure Canada, which had an exclusive partnership with government agency Parks Canada to bring passengers to Erebus’ top-secret watery grave (on orders, we turn off GPS on our phones and cameras). This bone-chiller afternoon above the Arctic Circle, I’m Gore-Tex-garbed, super-hyped and skimming in a 10-person Zodiac raft across choppy legendary seas en route to the restricted Erebus shipwreck site where underwater archaeologists are retrieving silt-coated clues, some as personal as part of an officer’s leather boot.
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